So here's the deal. Our Chinese hosts want top spot on the medals table and they want their diving team to lead the charge. China won five of eight diving gold medals at the Sydney Games in 2000 and six of eight golds in Athens four years later. More recently, they won nine of ten golds at the World Championships in Melbourne last year, so they are going for the clean sweep of eight here and no one would be surprised if they got it.

Like table tennis and badminton, here is a sport whose practitioners - unless they happen to be 14 years old and come from Plymouth - are barely heard of in Europe. In China, though, they transcend their sport and can pick up endorsements from anyone from McDonald's to Toshiba, at least they can if their name is Guo Jingjing, the diva diver who has followed the long journey to fame guided by the demands of her fast-changing but still communist nation.

Guo, 26, has been in the China team pretty much since the Atlanta Games in 1996 and winning medals ever since. Her only time outside the team is her story in short: she won two golds in Athens, returned an even bigger star than when she left and signed up to the kind of quantity of commercial work that, a decade previously, would never have been available. The excess and opulence, however, courted immediate unpopularity with the authorities and she was removed from the squad.

Also removed was Tian Liang, another Athens winner of gold, with whom she was being frequently linked and photographed by an increasingly Western-style paparazzi media. Guo came to heel and returned to the team; Tian, however, took the other route, quit the sport and later topped up his celebrity value by marrying a finalist of the 2005 edition of China's X-Factor talent show, Super Girl.

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Such is the way of the modern China. Heroes of the past were statecreated; children of the Sixties and Seventies would learn of the celebrated revolutionary soldier, Lei Feng, of his selflessness and modesty and the fact that he died in action when hit by a falling telephone pole.

Now China's heroes are branded in a totally different way, such as Yao Ming, the basketball player, or Liu Xiang, the hurdler, or Guo, who was recently declared, behind Yao and Liu, to be the third-highest earner in Chinese sport. Not that that means the paparazzi have left her alone. In February, she made headlines in a spurious pregnancy story; now she commands space in gossip columns because of a relationship with a Hong Kong business tycoon.

So she is admired by a nation that considers her a beauty queen and is obsessed by her love life, her painted nails and the expectation that she will finish her career here with a repeat of the Athens double. How she feels about all this, though, no one has the remotest idea because of her Garbo-esque approach to the circus that follows her. In Beijing, a written request for an interview is required, complete with a list of sample questions. And such requests are ignored. The word from the diving writer for China's People's Daily newspaper, who last interviewed her two years ago, is: “I like the way she dives but I just don't know her very well.”

What is she like? You get an idea from the Olympic test event here in February, where, at her post-event press conference, she responded uninterestedly to questions with one and two-word answers, then, when asked who her main Olympic rivals might be, started playing with her fingernails before naming a couple of Chinese followed by “and the fat Canadian”.

This reference to Blythe Hartley prompted the following diatribe from Xinhua, the state news agency: “It is unbelievable that at the same time when all the Chinese people are improving their manners and athletes receive comprehensive scientific, physical and psychological training, some stars are still short of the basic education on how to treat others.”

Outside of her own goldfish bowl, though, attitudes are a little different. The first point, Leon Taylor, Britain's silver medal-winner from Athens, explained, is that it is “astonishing to be so consistently brilliant”. Two golds here, he said, and she would be up there with Fu Mingxia (golds in three successive Games) and Greg Louganis (double golds in two) as “one of the legends of the sport”.

Taylor also said that she bears “that karma of a lovely person - which makes her more of a champion in my eyes”. To be a champion in the eyes of 1.3 billion people, she needs to win tomorrow and again next Sunday. Then she may at last tell us how it feels.

Starting to strike it rich

Most Chinese athletes have yet to command the salaries and endorsement contracts common for superstars in the US or Europe but are beginning to catch up. Yao Ming, the basketball star, topped this year's Forbes list of annual earnings of Chinese celebrities for the fifth time.

Yao Ming, basketball, £29.6million

Liu Xiang, 110 metres hurdles, £2m

Guo Jingjing, diving, £1.1m

Sun Jihai, Coca-Cola Championship football with Sheffield United, £750,000

Shao Jiayi, Bundesliga football with Energie Cottbus, £450,000

Dong Fangzhou, Barclays Premier League football with Manchester United, £370,000

Zheng Zhi, Coca-Cola Championship football with Charlton Athletic, £350,000