All Chinese Olympic athletes merit respect, whether they end up wearing gold or sucking wind. They are the hard as nails products of a system pioneered by daycare centers in Sparta, and perfected by the Kremlin’s sports gulags. Nary a one doesn’t have the eye of the proverbial tiger, earned from the age of six by leading lives resembling unending Rocky training montages.

Nonetheless, an extra helping of the credit for China’s ever-waxing sports prowess goes to her daughters, along with a side dish of irony. To misquote John Lennon, woman has always been the n-word of the world, and Confucius saddled her with three masters: her father in childhood, her husband in womanhood, and her son in widowed dotage. Protection was her reward for submission and bound feet. So when the ladies out-macho their protectors on the court, pitch, and lifting platform, it’s a great thing for irony and underdog-lovers everywhere.

For macho sons of Han, not so much. But they can console themselves with the mountains of medals their womenfolk bring home, and the pride all Chinese can share. The Chinese woman’s journey from caged pet to super-jock began with the May 4th Movement, a backlash against the Confucian precepts blamed for facilitating China’s mauling at Western hands. From 1916 to the early 1920s, girls’ schools and women’s colleges flourished, engendering China’s first female sports programs. Such nascent encouragement was enough to send Yang Xiuqiong to the Far-East Games in 1934, where she won five medals in swimming. Even in 1924, while western women were restrained to fencing and swimming at the Olympics, Chinese women played basketball, softball, and volleyball at the National Games, making them more progressive than the people they had been emulating.

The birth of the Republic was the true shot in the arm Chinese women needed to stimulate their athletic development, as their numbers in higher education leaped from some 27,000 nationwide to over 150,000 in ten years. The corresponding athletic programs, and the PRC’s massive centralized sports administration system were enough to do away with the notion that proper Chinese women didn’t run and jump. However, China’s involvement in the Korean conflict led to a twenty year ban from the Olympics.

The 1984 Los Angeles games were China’s coming out party, and Chinese women acquitted themselves well, with nine medals (four gold). At the next games in Seoul, they won 14. But it was in Barcelona that a disparity in China’s performance emerged. The women took 12 of China’s 16 gold medals. In 1996, 200 of China’s 310 Summer Olympic athletes were female, although the international average favors men two to one, what with so many more events for them. If any Chinese males at the Sports Administration had a problem with their kind being shown up, they were wise enough not to let it affect their ongoing push to produce more and more outstanding female athletes. As Ren Hai, a director at the Center for Olympic Studies in Beijing, told Newsweek, “From a strategic view, women are our best hope for winning medals.”

And not just at girlie sports like diving (sorry Mr. Louganis). Chinese women’s consistently strong showings in manly pursuits such as football, basketball, and weightlifting are enough to suggest that, when the Chinese teenage courtship ritual of slap-fighting and shin-kicking turns hostile, smart money doesn’t give odds on the girl.

So despite occasional hiccups in their song of glory, such as Gao Min’s 1995 sale of her gold medal for 666,666 RMB (presumably to Satan), Chinese Olympic ladies can be expected to do more than their share of medal hauling this Summer. Whichever half of the sky Chairman Mao was talking about, it’s definitely the half where shuttlecocks and volleyballs soar from feminine hands.