Young Mexico team resigned to more old jokes

BEIJING (Reuters) - With only one Mexican gold medal in the past five Summer Olympics, an old joke quips that the country's best runners, jumpers and swimmers are among the plucky migrants who have bolted, climbed or swum over the U.S. border.

The joke is wearing thin this year as Mexico prepares for the Beijing Games with a young and inexperienced team whose main strengths are in events like taekwando, archery and canoeing.

Athletics chiefs blame a string of retirements since the 2004 Olympics in Athens, where Mexico took four medals, for what they are calling a transition team whose average age is just 25 and which includes no former Olympic medal winners.

Mexico's 85-strong Olympic squad includes a 14-year-old girl in archery, a soldier and a newspaper vendor in racewalking and a canoeist who honed his arm muscles as a child paddling across central Mexico's misty Patzcuaro lake to get to school each day.

"We're in a transition stage. It's a young team," deputy delegation head Jorge Camacho said on Monday.

"We are hoping for good results in Beijing," he told Reuters, "(but) in London (2012) Mexico will win the most medals in its history."

Despite its position as one of Latin America's wealthiest nations and its high-altitude training camps around the capital, Mexico compares poorly to regional peers Brazil and Argentina.

While it has won at least one medal in every Summer Olympics since 1932, Mexico's total is just 51, a third of the number Cuba has won with a tenth of Mexico's population. Mexico has never matched the nine medals it won as Olympic host in 1968.

Camacho said Mexico needs to get better at talent-spotting, especially among the half of the country that lives in such dire poverty that thousands each year risk the perilous U.S. border crossing over fences, desert terrain and the Rio Grande river.

For Beijing, the odds look slim for Mexico after a string of top athletes quit in recent months, including popular 2004 400 meters silver medalist Ana Guevara, who said she was retiring because of cronyism in the national athletics federation.

Its best hopes include triple Pan-American diving champion Paola Espinosa and canoeist Jose Everado Cristobal, world champion of the 1,000 meter distance he used to paddle to school.

(Additional reporting by Pablo Garibian in Mexico City; Editing by Ed Osmond)