No fewer than 18 out of 32 runners collapsed on the humid and hilly marathon course at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. So when an unheralded New Yorker, Fred Lorz, crossed the finish line first, spectators wondered at his winning secret. A combination of Yankee ingenuity and technology, Lorz happily explained: he had hitched a ride in an automobile for 18 km of the race.

If, as expected, China's Wang Junxia dominates the women's 10,000-m in hot, humid Atlanta or her swimming comrade Le Jingyi eats up the 50-m freestyle, many skeptics will see more ingenious trickery at work. China is preparing to send its largest contingent ever--310 athletes--to the 1996 Games, and not-so-long-ago scandals in swimming and distance running will inevitably cast a shadow on any parade of Chinese women to the medal stand. They won, it will be whispered, the Chinese way.

Consider the case of Wang. In 1992 she did not rank in the top 50 worldwide in either the 1,500-m, 3,000-m or 10,000-m races. A year later, at the Chinese national championships in Beijing, she broke three world records four times in those events. In the 10,000 she lopped an incredible 42 sec. off Ingrid Kristiansen's 1986 record.

Similarly, Le failed to win a single medal in the Barcelona Olympics. A year later, at the world swimming championships in Palma de Mallorca, she broke world records in the 50-m and 100-m freestyle. The next year she repeated those feats in Rome, winning four golds. Her team--which had won only four golds combined in 1991--took 12 out of 16 in 1994.

Then came the debacle at Hiroshima, the site of the 1994 Asian Games. A total of 11 Chinese athletes (seven of them swimmers, including world champs Lu Bin and Yang Aihua) tested positive for dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, an anabolic steroid that masks other such drugs. Suddenly, the pieces fit together--the out-of-nowhere triumphs, the deep voices and broad shoulders, greater success for women (who are more susceptible to the performance-enhancing effects of steroids), even the hiring of one East German swimming coach in 1986. (At the time East Germany had the world's most sophisticated doping system.)

Although China's coaches continue to work for the national team, the guilty athletes were banned from competition for two years. In Hiroshima both Le and Wang tested negative at the Games. But the line on the Chinese had been written: they cheat.

Chinese officials loudly proclaim that they've since cleaned up their act. In 1994 Beijing authorized a representative of the Stockholm-based International Doping Test & Management firm to enter any sports facility in the country to conduct out-of-competition testing. Nearly 2,100 tests were performed last year, in contrast to 1,400 in 1994; only 17 athletes turned up positive, just over half the 1994 total. China has imposed 995 tests in the past six months alone, including four apiece on Wang and Le. The two stars, and all their Olympic mates, have been clean.

Denying any organized national effort to dope athletes, officials blame what cheating there is on selfish individualism and the temptations endemic to the new China. Gold-medal winners in Atlanta will each receive $9,600 from the government--in contrast to an annual urban per capita income of $465--and can expect thousands more in licensing and sponsorship deals.

A less plausible source of violations harks from the old China. Many elite performers rely on traditional herbal medicines to improve bodily functioning and recovery time after workouts. Semi-retired swim coach Chen Yunpeng feeds his charges a cocktail of ginseng root and ground deer horn, while the controversial Ma Junren has parlayed his supposed secret formulas--for example, fresh, soft-shelled turtle blood--into a multimillion-dollar business. "Our biggest headache is that we do not have enough resources to analyze all these traditional Chinese medicines and figure out whether they contain steroids," claims Dr. Yang Tianle, director of the National Research Institute of Sports Medicine.

Chinese officials sound a more convincing note when they stick to numbers. In a nation of 1.2 billion people, they say, the law of averages mandates a large pool of physical talent--as demonstrated by the rise of young superstars like swimmers Han Xue, 15, and Chen Yan, 16, after the banning of their elders. Yet that hardly explains how some athletes can be mediocre one year and almost superhuman later on.

The Chinese attribute their feats to superspartan training regimens. A former pig farmer and prison guard, coach Ma forces his charges among "Ma's Army" through the equivalent of 20 marathons a month, or more than 240 km each week, often at high-altitude sites like the western Qinghai-Tibet plateau (2,336 m above sea level). He also forbids them to wear makeup, long hair or clothes other than sportswear. When 18-year-old runner Liu Dong sought to break his rule against dating before age 22, the coach dismissed her from the squad.

Such tactics, rather than a steroid scandal, toppled Ma's Army in 1994. Accusing the coach of hoarding prize money and Mercedes-Benz from their 1993 victories, and beating underachieving athletes, tiny Wang led all but one of Ma's runners out of the center of Dalian, where they were secluded. For most of 1995 she avoided competition, fueling further suspicions that her attainments were the product of steroids. But Wang's claim that she needed time to regain her form has been borne out: after losing to Ma's newest star, teenager Jiang Bo, last October, Wang rebounded in the 1996 nationals. She is the only one of the mutineers traveling to Atlanta; no member of Ma's resurrected team in Dalian will make the trip.

In similar fashion, swimmer Le will be surrounded by new faces like Chen, who suddenly took four golds in five events at the 1996 Chinese qualifying trials in Tianjin. In fact, an 18-year-old teammate, Shan Ying, could provide Le's stiffest competition: the youngster upset her in the 100-m freestyle at the trials.

Still, the new lineups won't entirely squelch old concerns. The large difference in the success rate between male and female Chinese athletes continues to raise eyebrows while undermining the argument that extraordinary sports excellence derives from the large population base. Among Chinese men, only superstars like gymnast Li Xiaoshuang (the first Chinese man to win an all-around world championship), 23, and table-tennis veteran Wang Tao, 29, are favored to win gold in Atlanta. By contrast, Chinese women rank strongly in sports as varied as archery, badminton, basketball, diving, kayaking, gymnastics, judo, table tennis and shot put.

Not all those sports involve great physical strength or endurance, the traits that steroids build up. But suspicions, like rumors, die hard.

--Reported by Mia Turner/Beijing