China put on a nice Olympics… … so we ask, how are the country's Masters sports?

Beijing hosted what's been called the most fantabulous Olympics in history, with the home team winning 100 medals -- 51 of them gold. No surprise, since 1.3 billion people provide a pretty good talent pool. So how many gold medals did the People's Republic of China win at the World Masters Athletics Indoor Championships last March in Clermont-Ferrand, France?

Try zero.

Not a single PRC athlete competed in France.

In September 2007, about 9,000 Masters athletes flooded northeast Italy around Riccione for the World Masters outdoor track championships. How many from China? Eleven men and four intrepid women. Of course, Hong Kong also sent athletes to France and Italy. But that's a different story, given the "one country, two systems" policy that governs the former British colony.

Doesn't China revere its elderly? Well, yes. But when it comes to Masters track, China is barely a blip on the world scene. Part of this is due to severe outside-travel restrictions from the ruling Communist Party.

But what about Masters track within China? Don't millions compete at all ages? For those answers, I wrote a Masters friend in Hong Kong -- a British expatriate who prefers to go unnamed.

"China holds a single vets track meet, the national championships, every year," my friend replied. "This meager veterans activity, and their occasional forays to international meets, are organized by the same (group) that manages (Olympic champion hurdler) Liu Xiang et al ... The Communist Party is very nervous of any mass activity not organized by themselves ... As a result, China has virtually no amateur sports. In athletics, anyone other than the CAA trying to organize a meet, or even a road race, would run into problems. . . . Unlike Hong Kong, China athletes who go to overseas veterans meets have all their expenses paid. Unlike Taiwan, they don't have to compete for the selections. It's mostly based on connections."

It's a whole lot easier for foreigners to compete in China's Masters nationals, however. One was American Thierry Boucquey, a French Professor at Scripps College in California, who ran sprints at the Chinese Masters nationals in 2005 and did academic research as well.

In June 2005, Thierry wrote me: "I can tell you that I interviewed and polled 160 Chinese Masters in five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jinan and Dongying. I met with probably double that. I trained at excellent university facilities in all of these cities. . . . Everywhere, people were exceedingly friendly and quite frankly very surprised to be the subject of a foreign researcher's study."

He said China's 2005 Masters meet was held in Dongying in Shangdong Province and drew 600 athletes. Boucquey bettered all the sprinters in his M50 age group with a 12.23 in the 100-meter dash.

In May 2007, M50 runner Robert Herd of Australia and his wife, Denise, joined a Hong Kong team and traveled to Hangzhou to compete in the All-China National Veterans Athletics Championships -- the country's Masters nationals. After his return home, he posted an 1,800-word yarn of his experience.

Among his revelations: "First event was the 100-meter heats followed immediately by finals. Some quite good sprinters and plenty of enthusiastic participation by the rest, many running without spikes, not familiar with starting blocks, lots of false starts got away with. Didn't matter, the good runners won and got medals, the others had fun just being in it."

Herd concluded: "Both my performances had bettered the Chinese Grade 1 Standards for these distances, so I was also given a certificate and pin recognizing this. But the biggest reward was just participating. So much enthusiasm and so many happy faces made this a really great event to be part of." Such a shame that China doesn't make it easy for its own citizens to join in the fun.