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BEIJING, July 25 (Reuters) China's delegation for next month's Olympics will be the largest for any Games with 639 athletes representing the host nation in Beijing, sports minister Liu Peng said TODAY.
The team, featuring world sprint hurdles champion Liu Xiang and NBA All Star Yao Ming, includes entrants for 38 disciplines in all 28 sports at the August 8-24 Games.
''The luck of participating in an Olympics held in our motherland is a once in a century opportunity and a dream that our predecessors have fought to fulfil for 100 years,'' Liu Peng told a rally of the team, according to the sports ministry's website www.sports.cn.
''This historical chance for us ... is the honour of a lifetime and we are burdened with a glorious mission.'' Among the athletes are representatives from all 31 of the country's provinces, as well as the army, police and railway sports associations.
While 469 will make their Olympic debuts, 37 of them took part in the Sydney Games in 2000 and 165 were in Athens four years ago.
Liu Peng and 459 other officials and coaches bring the total size of the delegation to 1,099. A full list of the names was not released.
Dressed in the team uniform of red or yellow jackets, several hundred athletes took a pledge to harness the spirit of the relief operation for May's Sichuan earthquake to ''win honour for the nation and bring credit to the motherland''.
China won 32 gold medals in Athens, second only to the 36 claimed by the United States, and expectations are high that they will improve on that tally on home soil.
PLAYED DOWN Chinese officials have played down hopes of overhauling the US in the medals table but some analysts have said they will.
Dutch academics Gerard Kuper and Elmer Sterken have claimed success in using economic modelling to predict the number of medals a nation will win at the Olympics.
Their report on the Beijing Games, obtained by Reuters on Friday, predicts China will win 47 golds to top the medals standings ahead of the US, who they forecast will win just 29 golds.
Liu Xiang is one of China's few genuine hopes of gold in athletics, although his preparations for his 110 metres hurdles title defence have been disrupted by a hamstring injury.
''As long as I am able to compete in the Olympics, I don't care about anything else,'' he told CCTV. ''I'll do my best.'' Yao's team have the more modest ambition of reaching the last eight in the basketball tournament.
''At every Olympics, China is becoming better,'' the 7ft 6in (2.286m) Houston Rockets center said. ''But our rivals are improving too.'' The Chinese athletes preparing for the Games have largely been kept away from the media and requests to attend today's ceremony were refused for all but 10 reporters from state media.
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