New Delhi, 2028. It is the Olympic 100 m men's final. The fastest men in the world are coiled in their blocks, waiting for the gunshot that will start off the 10 most important seconds of their lives.
India is an eager Olympic host but not represented in the race. There is momentary silence in the heaving stadium, interrupted by the crack of the starter's pistol.
The race has begun, the sprinters' giant side-stepping strides consuming the hundred metres before them.
With metres to go, past runners from the United States, Britain, the Caribbean islands and Africa, comes a blood-red blur from an outside lane. In a supernova of flashbulbs, it goes over the line before all others; for the first time in history, a Chinese athlete is Olympic 100-m champion.
Don't snigger. It can happen. If the world's most committed and organised sporting nation puts its mind to producing an Olympic sprint champion in two decades, never mind can, it will happen.
The Beijing Olympics is proof that what China wants to achieve in sport, it does.
It is why it became the first country since 1936 to break the monopoly of the United States-Russia (and its old Soviet avatar) at the top of the Olympic gold medal tally.
It is how it won 100 medals in 25 different sports. It is how China struck gold in fencing, swimming, sailing, rowing, archery and silver in women's field hockey (in only its third Olympics).
Rechelle Hawkes, three-time Olympic hockey gold medal winner, says, "China has a culture where they try really hard to get to the next level."
This drive for constant improvement is what sporting success is built on-with an Olympics to host, the Chinese state put its weight and focus behind improvement.
On all the counts that add in to producing Olympic winners-talent identification, planning, funding and training-China proved to be more determined than any of its rivals to get the formula just right.
There is actually a formula and Indians constantly lamenting about vegetarianism, bad genes and bad karma, know what it is too; the difference between 51 golds and one gold lies merely in the willingness to perfect the formula and execute the plan.
Ever since 2001, when it won the right to stage the 2008 Olympics, China upped its spending on sport with a view to topping the gold medal tally in Beijing.
A report in China Youth Daily estimated that the cost of preparing China's athletes for Beijing 2008 was close to $586 million.
That would make it more than $11 million spent for every gold, or $5.86 million for every Beijing medal. According to the General Administration of Sport, the funds towards preparing athletes have come from two major sources annually: a budget allocation of 800 million RMB (Rs 507 crore) and an equal amount from the National Lottery given to the National Olympics Committee. Interestingly, India's sports budget for 2008-09 stands at Rs 1,111 crore.
After the 2004 Athens Olympics when China finished second behind the United States with 32 gold, there was an awareness that a sporting giant from the East was about to rise, specially as it was the 2008 Games host.
Chinese officials continued to play coy, denying that toppling the US was the goal for Beijing. Instead the catch phrase was that China wanted to head the "second leadership group" i.e. compete with Russia and Germany.
What was being devised in the background instead was a systematic plan to identify sports that yielded more gold medals than single-medal disciplines and to create a sustained programme for Chinese success around them.
This was referred to as Project 119, around the 119 gold medals to be won in track and field, swimming, canoeing/kayaking, rowing and sailing.
The Chinese establishment has denied the existence of such a project of any kind; but after winning its Olympic bid beefed up its top national training bases around the country. It pumped in $291million into its high altitude training base in Duoba in the north-west and put in an extra $10 million behind the canoeing/rowing facility at Thousand Island lake, south-west of Shanghai.
The Zinjiang Sports Training Base was built with donations from overseas Chinese where the national team strengthened their footwork and movement by practicing in a shallow pool full of quartz sand.
The biggest shift in China's sports philosophy, it can be argued, is not Project 119 but a willingness to hire the best professional coaches for their athletes no matter what the cost.
For Beijing, China hired as many as 38 foreign coaches: its women's hockey coach was South Korean, its fencing coach French, its baseball coach was American, its rowing coach Russian.
That Russian Igor Gringko, who was paid $90,000 a year, said, "Coaches like me help them win gold medals, or we are fired." Forty-four days before the Olympics, Josef Capousek, a German kayaking coach was.
The work ethic of the Chinese athletes trainees has struck home with the coaches, Australian Tom Maher with the Chinese women's basketball team saying the Chinese worked harder than any other athletes he had seen.
This is most likely an indirect fallout of the athletes having come through China's unified sports schools system, which, at the last count, totalled 3,000 schools all over the county and four lakh athletes.
It is an old-style 1950s communist-style regimen, where children are divided into sports on the basis of their physical characteristics: the smaller children go on to become gymnasts and divers, some starting as early as six years, the bigger into taking up sports requiring strength.
China's push behind sport has been both focused and sustained. After its 1984 re-entry into the Olympic movement, the then premier Deng Xiaoping said, "It looks like the impact and influence of sports are so great that they reflect a country's economy and civilisation… we need to improve our sport."
That instruction, writes sports historian Xu Guoqi, "immediately became official policy". China's first sports-related law was passed in 1995 and declared that sporting activities should be under the direct control of the state council and that its athletes should be instructed on patriotism, collectivism and socialism.
It is a very heavy load for the young to be hauling around, particularly as the Games came home. Every day in Beijing, there were photos and footage of Chinese weeping-in joy or grief, frustration or relief.
The pressure from the state to succeed has extracted a severe cost from young athletes who live away from their homes, spend long hours in training rooms and have little freedom of choice.
Gold medal winning judoka Xian Dongmei saw her baby daughter once in 15 months before the Games, warbling to her over the telephone and seeing her on live Internet video for a few minutes every day.
Li Fenglian, doctor for the Chinese national diving team, published a study last year which stated that 26 of 184 divers on the national team had retina damage.
Officials told Sun Haiping, coach to star hurdler Liu Xiang, that if Liu failed to win a gold in Beijing, all his previous achievements would become 'meaningless'. After being fired, coach Capousek said, "Chinese sport is like the military, with a big hierarchy. The athlete is the lowest in the hierarchy."
Within China, there is now a growing debate around an unrelenting sports system which has churned out its champions but also spit them away.
In 2007, the case of long-distance runner Ai Dongmei who tried to sell her medals on the Internet after she struggled to find a job, caused a stir.
Jiang Yi, the editor of Sports Illustrated China says, "Our sports academies have to reform in the future; parents are reluctant to send their children to a place that does not provide a proper education and different options."
The Chinese Government knows that sport is a quasi-diplomatic tool and the ideal non-threatening advertisement for its growing global power.
After the staggering success of Beijing 2008 on all counts, what could possibly be next? The consensus in China indicates that the resources available for Beijing 2008 will taper off.
Jiang says, "In the old days, sports was a way of propaganda, a way to build national pride, but today I don't think winning a gold medal is such a big deal for people. Twenty years ago, yes, but China is a more confident country now."
People may think of sport in one way but China's monolithic government is under no compulsion to agree with its people.
The final press conference of the Chinese Olympic Committee (COC) featured a row of six sober middle-aged men in suits. One of them was Sports Minister and COC President Liu Peng who, far from being triumphalistic, adopted a tone of gracious humility.
As a slack-jawed world listened, Liu said, Beijing had given the Chinese the opportunity to "learn from all of you" and emphasised the need for his countrymen to "keep sober-minded".
China, he rued, was still "lagging behind" in the medal count, in the number of athletes figuring in the top 8, in track and field, swimming, cycling. The Chinese were still, he emphasised, "unbalanced" in terms of the medals they won.
After an Olympics in which they cleaned out a nice, even rounded number of 100 medals, more than half of them gold, Liu was taking understatement to a new level.
Or maybe he was actually resorting to the grand euphemism so typical of this rising Middle Kingdom where riots are referred to as "mass incidents" and the punishment of public confession reclassified as "self-criticism".
They even refer to their team as the "Chinese Olympic delegation" making them sound like WTO diplomats pushing for more favourable export terms and not what it really is-the formidable, athletic species now known to the world as Olympus buttkickus.
Hidden behind Liu's solemn introspection is, quite possibly, the beginning of the next stage in China's sporting evolution. An industrious and methodical nation has identified some new targets.
Maybe at the end of the Beijing Olympics, what China really wanted to say to the sporting world gathered inside its courtyard was this: hello everyone and thanks for coming. From this day on, be afraid. Be very afraid.
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