Coaches of the all-conquering Chinese national table tennis team will have a word on the roster for next year's Beijing Olympic Games but won't decide it, a senior Chinese sports official told Xinhua in Wuhan today.

  "I don't know who will represent China at the 2008 Olympic Games, nor do the coaches of the national team now," said Cai Zhenhua, the former chief coach of the national team and now a deputy minister of the State Sports Administration of China.

Cai made these remarks when watching matches of the ongoing 6thChinese City Games featuring nearly all top paddlers of under-20 category in China.

"Words of the national coaches and I only work referencedly for the final roster," said Cai, who led China to the top of world table tennis stage in the last two decades.

"According to the qualification rules, only three men and three women of each team could make the Olympic Games. So the internal competitions vying for a position in the Chinese squad must be hot fought," he said, adding that the table tennis Olympian selection will be "fair and square".

"The basic principle of making China's Olympic squad is to select team members with a fair and public system. To carry out that, the coaching staff will put results from some national and international events into consideration.

"Not one or two matches or all the matches, but some of the important tournaments like the world championships and the World Cup will count.

"Since there're too many talented paddlers in China, it'll be fair and easy for the national team to choose Olympians through public selection," he added.

In the latest rankings released by the world table tennis governing body ITTF earlier this month, China keeps their dominance by occupying six of top ten men's and five of top ten women's rankings.

Newly-crowned World Cup winner Wang Hao leads the men's standings with quartic World Cup title holder Ma Lin and three-time world champion Wang Liqin in the second and third places respectively, while the "Grand Slam" paddler Zhang Yining on top of the women's, followed by teenage talent Guo Yue, who's playing here at the City Games, and the leading veteran Wang Nan.

For the latest world championships, the Chinese national team twice had public trials for the 2006 team worlds at Bremen and the2007 Zagreb worlds. No such trials for Olympic Games so far, however.

Cai, firstly becoming a Chinese national coach in 1991, has been regarded as the most successful coach in table tennis history, leading China to win more than ten Olympic gold medals under his 13-year reign, before the 46-year-old was named the director of the Table Tennis and Badminton Administrative Center late 2004 after the Athens Olympic Games.