Beijing: Looking for an extra burst of speed? How about a little deer's horn? Aches and strains? Perhaps a dose of sea horse in alcohol. And for stamina, a dash of turtle's blood may do the trick.

Chinese athletes are pepping themselves up for this year's Sydney Olympics with a cocktail of traditional medicines based on roots, fungi and animal parts used as tonics and elixirs in China for thousands of years.

Sports officials, desperate to clean up China's tarnished sporting image after a string of doping scandals, are anxious to know what exactly lurks within these ancient remedies.

Most of the Chinese athletes busted for doping so far have taken performance-enhancing drugs developed in the West, such as anabolic steroids and diuretics.

But there is a chance that Chinese athletes could fall foul of strict doping rules by quaffing home-grown brews based on secret recipes handed from generation to generation.

Many are sold in ready-prepared packages with scant details of ingredients or their chemical properties, like Dalishen Oral Liquid, a popular panacea based on seal's penis and testes.

"Just about every sports team is widely using traditional Chinese medicine - this has become established practice," said Zhang Shiming, director of the Sports and Injury Research Institute in the western city of Chengdu.

"Chinese medicine can help athletes to recover faster from fatigue after exercise and can also improve their performance," said Zhang, who heads a team of doctors examining the use of such medicines in sport.

Placebos and pick-me-ups

Doctors say Chinese herbal medicines can range from placebos and mild restoratives to powerful pick-me-ups containing natural stimulants such as ephedrine, or mahuang in Chinese, which is banned by international sports federations.

Among the fillips favoured by athletes are the ginseng root, a medicinal plant known as huangjing or sealwort, the lingzhi mushroom and extracts of animal parts ranging from deer's tail to dog's kidney, doctors say.

The most notorious are the magic potions of turtle's blood and caterpillar fungus used by maverick coach Ma Junren to fuel his team of women distance runners, who shattered a string of world records in the early 1990s.

Zhang says the majority of these do not contain banned substances and cannot be used in the same way as Western performance-boosting drugs."In my experience, it's impossible to find a traditional Chinese medicine to replace a stimulant," he said.

"But if we use Chinese medical theory to adjust the balance of the entire body, it can have the same effect as a stimulant."