AFP
20 February 2000 – Beijing - China's colourful athletics coach Ma Junren Sunday sounded a battle-cry for the Sydney 2000 Olympics when his new army of female athletes dominated an international road race in Beijing.
Ma chose the Beijing International Ekiden marathon relay to mark his return to international competition after five years in the wilderness, and the popular coach was mobbed by the Chinese press at the race.
His Chinese national team took first place while the second team he coaches from his home city of Dalian in northeast Liaoning province took second place just a second later.
The six-member Dalian team led most of the way but appeared to ease up in the final stretches of the marathon-length course and crossed the line just outside the national team's winning time of two hours, 15 minutes and 49 seconds.
Ethiopia finished a distant third, followed by Russia and Mexico.
"The Olympics? We are not ready, we only just got our training centre built. We'll be ready for 2004," Ma joked with journalists.
"Today's times were okay, they were normal, but they are not important, the important thing was to win the race," he said at the finish line.
Ma dismissed with a wave of the hand suggestions the Dalian team had allowed the national team to win.
Ma was also mum on what expectations he had for his new runners at the Sydney Olympics, although he exuded confidence about their ability.
And he dismissed a People's Daily article last week which had said he would only be satisfied with an Olympic medal at the Games as "not realistic."
However, Cui Dalin, head of the Liaoning provincial sports federation, told AFP that the Ekiden kicked off Ma's preparations for Sydney.
"Right now Ma is earnestly making preparations for this year's Olympics," Cui said.
"Ma's runners are young and they don't have any international experience so after our Olympic trials we hope to enter some international races during the summer," he said.
During the relay race, six of Ma's runners ran the 5000m portions of the six-part relay between 15:20 and 16:09, while four others ran the 10,000m portion between 31:19 and 32:35.
The fastest 5000m of the day was run in 15:20 by both Lan Lixin and Lu Cui, while Song Liqing ran 10,000m in 31:19 and Dong Yanmei in 31:49.
Sensation Jiang Bo did not run because of injury, while standouts Yi Lili and Wu Qingdong both ran the seven-kilometre final portion of the race in a slow 24:54.
Ma is a controversial figure known across China for his unorthodox training methods as well as his sports tonics of caterpillar fungus and turtle's blood.
He shot to fame when his stable of relatively unknown women's runners produced a stunning clean-sweep of the middle and long distance events at the 1993 World Athletics championships in Stuttgart, Germany.
