Though its young people have helped it grow in popularity, the Chinese seek to strike a balance between old ways and new in the republic.

Whether she’s traveling to China or the Olympics or just to another state for a national title, US gold medalist Natalie Coughlin never leaves home without her French press.

“I always bring my coffee French press because I hate bad coffee,” the swimmer recently told MSNBC. “And I bring my own coffee…from home.”

This year’s Olympics are one place she needn’t worry about bringing it along. Coffee and espresso have made their mark in recent years in the tea-drinking Republic of China, home to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The country seems to have perpetuated a love-hate relationship with the brew as young Chinese strive to embrace all things Western while the nation’s traditionalists grow frustrated over the rise of coffee’s popularity.

Lucky for Coughlin, the athlete’s village is populated with coffee shops and espresso devotees who refuse to start a day of competition without it. NBC, the only American network broadcasting the games, has said that approximately 1,500 cups of coffee are served each day from the network’s commissary. The network even went so far as to install a Starbucks there specifically for the broadcasters.

Michael Phelps, the games’ winningest athlete with a record eight gold medals to his name, includes two cups of black coffee with his famed 12,000 calorie-per-day diet. With 2,000 of those calories taken up energy drinks, Phelps could probably fire up the espresso machine instead and get just as much of a boost while saving some of those calories for another helping of the two pounds of pasta he normally consumes in a day.

Perhaps it’s those jolts of caffeine that give athletes like Phelps and Coughlin an added boost over their competition. New research on coffee’s health benefits has revealed that caffeine found in coffee and espresso can sometimes enhance athletic performance. One Canadian study even found that men who ingested caffeine tablets prior to running where able to continue their pace for up to ten minutes longer than those who only drank water.

This research might help us all feel better about our daily java habits on this side of the globe, but much like the visiting athletes themselves, the Chinese persist in keeping caffeine at arm’s length. There may be a Starbucks at the Great Wall, but the opening of a one of the chain’s smaller stores inside a gift shop in Beijing’s Forbidden City caused a stir when it opened in 2000. Many of Beijing’s citizens were outraged and felt that the store’s location was a commercialistic affront to a sacred historic monument.

Meanwhile, chinadaily.com reported last year that popularity of coffee and espresso drinks is at an all-time high among young, urban Chinese. Demand for the country’s own Arabica, grown in the Yunnan province, has grown exponentially with 45,000 tons of the homegrown beans consumed in 2006.

Reports say that tea’s popularity still outnumbers coffee by nearly 90 percent in this country of 1.3 billion, but some say coffee’s reach has even begun to expand to into more rural provinces. Often in the form of instant coffee in a bottle or packets of coffee called Three-in-One that include cream and sugar, it doesn’t quite have the look or flavor that most coffee-drinking Westerners are used to.

But just as the 2008 Olympic games have given the world a taste of China, we’ve seen that its flavor is only being changed slightly by the modern world’s influences. Maybe coffee is just one of them.

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