It is not every day that a nation worships a pixie who bounces off a springy mat more than a dozen feet into the air, flipping and floating and twisting like Batman above the skyscrapers of Gotham.

Skip to next paragraphBut He Wenna, the gold medalist in women’s trampoline, has emerged as one of the unlikely heroes of the Beijing Games.

A forest of Web sites dedicated to the 19-year-old He has sprung up. Thousands of Chinese on the Internet have voted her the prettiest gold medal winner. Her male admirers have come up with a saying, “A man should marry a woman like He Wenna.”

“We’re sure that ‘Beauty He’ will be a star,” said Wang Qinbo, a reporter for Titan Sports, the most popular sports newspaper in China.

China is a nation of 1.3 billion people hungry for a hero. Their great hope, Liu Xiang, the champion in the 110-meter hurdles in the 2004 Olympics, dropped out of competition because of an injury. No Chinese champion from these Games has achieved his stature, and the government, the news media and the big companies here have yet to throw the spotlight on any one star.

But with a haul of 51 gold medals, China has its choice of Olympic celebrities to help fill the void.

Some, like the diver Guo Jingjing, 26, are already big-name athletes who solidified their reputations during these Games. Guo won two gold medals in 2004 in Athens and two in Beijing, and her striking face has long appeared across China on billboards and in television commercials (not to mention the gossip columns — she dates the grandson of a Hong Kong billionaire).

But many of the Chinese Olympic athletes attracting the most attention after two weeks of competition would barely merit any coverage by ESPN, much less People magazine, even if they were from the United States. They are athletes who won gold medals in sports like trampoline, badminton and weight lifting. To a Western audience, their sports are marginal, their fame fleeting.

But in China, those athletes embody the virtues that fans seek in their heroes. The Chinese want a champion who is photogenic. They want a champion who is articulate. Perhaps most important, they want a champion who is humble, even though they enjoy watching a showman like the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.

The Chinese often praise Liu and the basketball star Yao Ming for their modesty.

Still, as in the United States, which Olympic athletes become lionized depends on marketing, an increasingly sophisticated tool in China.

“In today’s commercial society, it’s not the medal itself that makes an athlete a hero, but the mass media,” said Hao Qin, the head of the sports journalism department at Chengdu Sport University in Sichuan Province. “And it’s becoming more and more important for Chinese athletes that they should learn to manage their image, to learn how to deal with the media. They should know that they’re becoming commercial brands.”

He added: “I think this time, women’s beach volleyball and women’s tennis players may become new idols, because people love to watch them. But weight lifting and judo players may not get the same attention.”

Beach volleyball is not a sport that many Chinese are familiar with. It is safe to say that the sight of scantily clad athletes romping in a sand pit, accompanied by cheerleaders in bikinis and a pop-music soundtrack, caught many spectators by surprise.

But on Thursday, footage of the gold-medal match featuring the Chinese women’s team of Tian Jia and Wang Jie against the United States team of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh was shown over and over on CCTV, the main state television network. There were Tian and Wang, in red two-piece swimsuits, making dives, spiking the ball and high-fiving each other.

“I believe today we have created a historic breakthrough,” Wang, 24, said at a news conference. “I hope that through this match, we can promote the development of this sport in China.”

Athletes who have the dual advantage of good looks and of playing in a popular sport have an even easier path to stardom.

Lin Dan, the 24-year-old badminton gold medalist who is nicknamed Super Dan, makes women across China swoon. With his spiky hair, he looks like a Hong Kong pop idol. He can hit the shuttlecock at more than 180 miles per hour, much faster than the fastest tennis serve (155 m.p.h. by Andy Roddick). Lin has what some consider an endearingly retro aura: he is an officer in the People’s Liberation Army and wore a pin of Mao Zedong on his shirt while competing in the men’s singles gold-medal match.

Last year, well before he won Olympic gold, he was named the country’s “most international” man by For Him, a popular fashion magazine.

On one Chinese Web site, Internet surfers rated Lin the most popular athlete, with 1,851 votes.

Lin also attracts attention because of his relationship with Xie Xingfang, who won the silver medal in women’s singles for badminton.

Even in China, where sex is discussed less openly than in the West, the love lives of Olympic athletes can give them a boost in popularity. That has been the case with Guo, the very photogenic so-called Princess of Diving. She appeared regularly in the tabloids while she was dating Tian Liang, who won four medals in men’s diving, including two golds, at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.

Guo then stayed in the gossip pages when she began seeing Kenneth Fok Kai-kong, the Hong Kong playboy. Guo is considered the most financially successful female athlete in China, having signed endorsement deals with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Toshiba. These days, her face appears all over Beijing on billboards for milk.

“I think Guo Jingjing is the best,” Zhou Ying, 29, a tourist from Shanghai, said Friday as she stood near the Water Cube. “She’s excellent in diving, and meanwhile, she’s a pop star, too. I can see her news both in the sports section and the entertainment section of the newspaper.”

Skip to next paragraphBut Guo’s career also offers a cautionary tale in overexposure. After the Athens Games, she signed a slew of endorsement contracts, only to be barred from the national team for becoming too commercial. She was reinstated after she made a public pledge to recommit to diving. Guo has also occasionally suffered a backlash from the Chinese news media for being standoffish toward reporters.

Hao, the sports journalism professor, said a decisive factor in propelling a Chinese athlete to stardom is “any historical breakthrough, if it’s the first gold, because we Chinese pay more attention to the first.”

That is why Olympic champions like the men’s gymnast Zou Kai — “He has such a cute baby face!” gushed one fan on the Internet — or the men’s weight lifter Zhang Xiangxiang may attract a lot of buzz, but still not be able to reach the level of the hurdler Liu.

The 19-year-old swimmer Liu Zige set the world record in winning the women’s 200-meter butterfly, but she is not the first swimmer from this country to win a gold medal.

One intriguing possibility is Zou Shiming, 27, a boxer in the light-flyweight division. He won China’s first gold medal in boxing on Sunday after his opponent from Mongolia dropped out in the second round because of a shoulder injury. Zou, the most successful amateur boxer from China, won a bronze in Athens and has two world titles to his name.

Boxing is a marginalized sport, but depending on how Zou is marketed, he could reshape the image of Chinese masculinity, as Liu and Yao have done.

“I think he’ll have a good chance to become the next Liu Xiang,” said Li Chengpeng, a well-known sports blogger.

In his semifinal bout Friday night, Zou showed a canny ability to work the crowd. He pummeled Paddy Barnes of Ireland, winning by decision, 15-0. It was Zou’s best bout yet. The audience went wild whenever he did a quick shuffle while dancing around Barnes.

After the winner was announced, Zou faced the stands and bowed in each direction, letting his fans know that, like China’s great sports heroes, he could also be humble.

 

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