After a 20-year wait, Asia is ready to host the Summer Olympics again, as China takes its turn to stage international sport's biggest extravaganza.
Kosume Kitajima, who captured Olympic gold medals in the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke races in Athens in 2004, is one of Japan's top medal hopefuls for the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.
AP PHOTOChina is greeting the New Year confident it can show the world it has grown as a dynamic sports power in parallel with its meteoric economic growth — just as Japan did in 1964 and South Korea in 1988.