Take a look at China’s rising Olympic gold medal count, and you can understand why a senior U.S. Olympics official fielded questions Monday on whether China is the team to beat at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

In 1996, China took home a respectable 16 gold medals in Atlanta. It reaped 28 gold medals in Sydney in 2000, and rose again to 32 gold medals in Athens in 2004.

They’ve doubled the count since 1996. What’ll it be in 2008?

In contrast, the U.S. team took home 44 gold medals in 1996, 39 gold medals in 2000, and 35 gold medals in 2004. You see where that trend line is going, don’t you?

At a ceremony Monday to mark a partnership with Beijing Normal University, which will serve as a training center for U.S. Olympians, USOC secretary general James Scherr noted that the upcoming games will be extremely competitive.

Afterward, Scherr spoke of the “tremendous” resources China in pouring into preparing its team, and added: “We clearly think they will have an exceptionally strong team on the field of play. We’re not sure how we can compete with them on the gold medal count, in terms of where they’re at now and where they might be in 2008.”

Exactly how much China is spending is unclear.

“You can extrapolate across what they’re spending to build out the facilities and venues and infrastructure in the city of Beijing, which by all measures is well in excess of $30 billion. You would assume that they would spend what it takes to be competitive on the field of play.”

“The numbers that we’ve heard that they are putting into the preparation for these games – the number of athletes, the coaches they’ve secured, and the amount they’re putting into performance sciences – is very impressive indeed,” Scherr said.