Winter Olympics: Where might China's medals come from at Beijing 2022?

Eileen Gu - or Gu Ailing as she is known in China - won three world championship and three X Games medals in 2021

Jeff Pain had no doubt about his brief when he became China's skeleton coach seven years ago: "We're hiring you because we want to win a gold medal," he was told.

When you consider the Beijing 2022 hosts had at the time never competed at an Olympics in this sport, the statement was more than a little ambitious.

But now, a week before the Games start, it may not necessarily be unrealistic.

While China are not expecting the dizzying successes of their 2008 Beijing summer Olympics, where they topped the medal table with 48 golds and a total of 100 medals, they have once again invested heavily to develop athletes across the full range of sports.

After setting a target of getting 300 million people participating in winter sports in the country, hiring foreign coaches and operating a strong talent identification programme, they have been tipped by analysts to improve on their best showing of 11 medals, including five gold, from Vancouver in 2010.

It seems the Chinese medal machine is about to deliver once again - so, what can we expect and how did they get there?

Who are China's top medal prospects?

Freestyle skier Eileen Gu - or Gu Ailing as the 18-year-old is known in China - is set to be the face of her home Games and with good reason.

She is the world champion in halfpipe and slopestyle and also has a medal chance in big air.

The American-born teenager, who began representing China in 2019 after switching to her mother's nationality, has also shown her commercial potential by modelling for high-profile brands and her intelligence with a place at Stanford University.

In their virtual medal table, data analysts Nielsen Gracenote predict she will win two golds and a bronze with China picking up a record 13 medals in total, including six golds.

"The projected medals are all in sports in which the Chinese have previously won medals - figure skating, freestyle skiing, short track, snowboard and speed skating," said Simon Gleave, head of sports analysis at Nielsen Gracenote.

Wu Dajing will seek to defend his men's 500m short-track title, while Ren Ziwei has won World Cup golds in the 1,000m and 1,500m and the relay teams are tipped to do well.

Short-track has provided 10 of the 13 Winter Olympic gold medals China have ever won.

Figure skating pair Sui Wenjing and Han Cong will be hoping to go one better than their 2018 silver, and speed skaters Ning Zhongyan and Gao Tingyu could be medal contenders.

A lack of international competitions during the coronavirus pandemic has made it harder to gauge form generally, but China are strong in the aerials, having won eight medals in the past three Games in the discipline. They have excellent chances of success again, including in the new mixed team aerials.

In snowboarding they have Liu Jiayu, whose 2018 halfpipe silver was China's first medal in any Olympic snowboard discipline, and two-time halfpipe world champion Cai Xuetong.

And there could also be some surprises in some of their new sports, with many pointing to the sliding track.

"Their athletes will have let's say 400 runs, where everybody else will have 45. So there is a huge home field advantage," Canadian former skeleton athlete Pain, who coached the Chinese team from 2015 to 2019, told BBC Sport.

Geng Wenqiang, who won a World Cup gold in November, had been expected to be selected in the men's skeleton team but China instead chose Yin Zheng and Yan Wengang. Neither of the women they have picked have finished higher than 15th in a senior international event.

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Foreign coaches and a 'limitless' budget

For some time China has been bringing in foreign coaches to guide their athletes in sports where they are not traditionally strong - their rowing head coach at Tokyo 2020 was British five-time Olympic champion Sir Steve Redgrave and they won three rowing medals at the same Games for the first time.

When Pain arrived as skeleton coach, he had to manage expectations and get the Chinese to understand "how difficult first it is to get there and then to succeed" at a Games in this sport.

He also faced challenges with the budget - almost limitless in some ways but restrictive in others because "the need to buy something today has to be planned almost a year in advance".

Pain left his post in 2019 because he did not want to live in China full-time, but even though he is now coaching the Austrian team, he says he will feel pride watching the team in Beijing as he brought so many of them to the sport and developed them.

"They are sort of like my kids! I raised them in a sense and now they are off into the world," he said.

A move away from the 'win-at-all costs' mentality?

A decade ago when champion gymnast Zhang Shangwu was found begging on the streets of Beijing, performing acrobatic tricks for loose change, the spotlight was shone on the Chinese state sports system.

Children as young as six were being sent away by their parents to sports schools to train as future Olympic champions. Those who succeed can expect to be rewarded with money and status, but there are many stories of those who do not and are abandoned by the state.

Beijing-based journalist Mark Dreyer said the Zhang situation had prompted some soul-searching and there was "a government push as well as an organic trend among the middle class to say that sport is healthy but sport for sport's sake".

"An enjoyment of sports rather than 'I'm going to sacrifice my kid to be part of the state system'," he added.

More evidence of a shift in attitude came at last year's Tokyo Olympics, where state media urged the public to be more "rational" after silver-medal-winning table tennis athletes faced online abuse from nationalists who view anything less than gold as unpatriotic.

"There is generally a progression away from the kind of 'win-at-all-costs' mentality - it is trending in a more healthy direction," said Dreyer, author of Sporting Superpower and writer for China Sports Insider.

"Intellectually they realise that it's not doing anything for the country to win a bunch of Olympic medals in sports that no-one really competes in, but emotionally it's still hard to accept that maybe we might not win 50 golds like we did in Beijing 2008 and actually that's a good thing."

The athlete selection system for these Games has been different because since winning the bid in 2015 there was not long enough to bring the really young children through. That means they have turned to older athletes from different sports, like bringing distance runners into cross-country skiing.

Measures of success at these Games may be presented domestically in different ways to simply a medal count, with the country saying it has exceeded its target of getting 300 million people into winter sports and is set to meet or come very close to its aim of having Chinese athletes qualifying for every event.

"I think it's quite easy for them to hold that up and say this is just one step along the way," Dreyer said. "Any medals is the icing on the cake."