麻豆约拍

As the Olympics juggernaut starts to roll, Professor David Forrest of Salford University provides the bottom line on what it really costs a nation to get its athletes onto the winning podium. And as China aspires to Olympic glory in basketball, we hear from Bob Weiss, one of the NBA coaches hired to raise the standard of the sport in China. There are more than 300 million basketball fans in China, it's calimed, but as writer, Jim Yardley, explains, the problems the sport has faced are a revealing emblem of the wider challenges facing China as it expands economically.