"Even without the Olympics, we planned to build a sports center like this for the city," said Yu. "However, the Olympic Games have advanced our plan by several years."

Li said, "We also target this center at providing exercise facilities for ordinary citizens."

The top-notch facilities are not cheap. The investment in the whole Olympic Center has surpassed 700 million yuan, while maintenance requires an extra 6 million yuan every year. The soccer training fields are rented to the city's residents at 1,000 yuan per game, just enough to cover the maintenance expenses, but that amount is far beyond the capacity of ordinary people since the average disposable income of the city's residents last year was only 9,394 yuan.

Besides generous spending on sports facilities, a lot of money has been poured into a facelift for the city. Yu said the city has spent over 3 billion yuan building and repairing roads and highways in the last three years. Wang Haitao, another official of the Qinhuangdao Olympic office, said, "A large percentage of the investment for building the Olympic Center comes from bank loans. After all, we are not a big city."

The people's Olympics

Qinhuangdao's residents generally like the changes brought by the Olympics. Besides the fame that helps to draw in more money from tourism, residents have an opportunity to watch high-level games that are aimed at preparing the stadium for the Olympics. In the first nine months of this year, the soccer stadium has three times been the home stadium for the Chinese Olympic soccer team and the Chinese national soccer team when they played against other Asian national teams. Each game attracted over 15,000 people, mainly city residents.

Zeng Fanmeng has been a taxi driver for seven years. He is no soccer fan, so for him the day-to-day benefits from the city's hosting of the Olympics come from wider streets and more exercise equipment in his neighborhood. "I also look forward to more work and better income during the Olympics," said Zeng.

With a population of 2.76 million, Qinhuangdao is a small city by Chinese standards, but it is an important sports training base in China. As early as 1973, the General Administration of Sports set up a training base containing facilities for baseball, volleyball, tennis, table tennis, weightlifting and other sports, where dozens of world champions took their first steps toward the medal podium over the years.

China's state-sponsored National Soccer School was founded at the training base in 1994. "The training base and the soccer school are definitely important factors behind Qinhuangdao's successful bid for soccer games," said Li of the Qinhuangdao Olympic office. He said the National Soccer School will contribute to the Olympics by offering its 13 fields for the training of the 22 national Olympic teams, while the experienced coaches from the school could participate in the preparatory work by providing their football expertise.

In return, the football school has already felt the benefits from the city's successful bid for the Olympics. Since major games will be played in the Olympic stadium before 2008 to test the facilities and organization teams, Shi Yongsheng, deputy head coach of the school, said the opportunity to watch games between national teams will be a good learning experience and great encouragement for his students, especially considering that four of the school's alumni are on the national Olympic team. Tickets for all three international games this year are given to the students, whose ages range from 10 to 21.

In April, the soccer school began preparations to form its own club and team to play in the Chinese Super League representing Qinhuangdao. Shi said there would no better home for the prospective league team than the new Olympic center.

Yu noted, however, that Qinhuangdao still has a lot of preparatory work to do on the "software" for the Olympics. First is the training of people, including the recruitment and training of volunteers that will start next May, language training for people working in service industries and the streamlining of the organization of the Olympic office. Second is the logistics during the games, including traffic, telecommunications, security and the mobilization of society to prepare for the upcoming event.

"We have tried to keep a low profile and engage ourselves in practical work until the opening of the Olympics," said Yu. "After the world sees the best Olympics ever, I would be more than happy to discuss whatever people want to know."

Note: This is the first of a series of articles on the six Olympic co-host cities-Qingdao, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenyang and Qinhuangdao.