Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice, who won three gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, put Ye's success partly down to fact that she has trained with such world-class coaches as Denis Cotterell and Ken Wood.

Ye Shiwen in women's 200-meter indiviual medley race at 2012 London Olympics.

Denis Cotterell is famous for the kind of high intensity training which Chinese swimmers usually struggle with at first. However Cotterell says that they soon adjust and eventually reach new and improved levels of performance.

According to Ken Wood, Chinese female swimmers are very conscious of keeping fit, and that's their secret of success. According to Wood, Ye in particular maintains a perfect balance between strength and weight, which allowed her to produce such an incredible final leg in the result in her 400-meter individual medley.

The overall planning which has gone into the Chinese swimming team has also contributed to Ye's success. Over the past four years, the national swimming team has organized six training campaigns for young athletes all over the country. It has also introduced more flexible selection rules and introduced improved training methods.

Adrian Moorhouse, a gold medalist in the 100-meter breaststroke in the 1988 Seoul Games identified another possible reason for China's ability to unearth such a gem. "There are a lot of people in China," he said. "The base of their pyramid is so wide -- if they train thousands and thousands and thousands of kids they might just find their Michael Phelps."