The best place to catch some kungfu action next year may be the
Olympics stadium.
Chinese Olympic Committee Vice-President Zhang Faqiang has
officially confirmed that wushu will be featured at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the China News
Service reported yesterday.
Zhang was quoted as saying that wushu or kungfu, will neither be
a medal sport nor a mere demonstration. Instead, the event
featuring it will be named the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games Wushu
Competition.
The event won't share the demonstration status that taekwondo
enjoyed at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics and is not going to be
included as an official sport for the Beijing Games.
But its Olympics debut will "have extremely significant
implications" for wushu's eventual entry as a competitive event,
said Li Jie, chairman of the China Martial Arts Association.
Currently, all of the 28 Olympic sports, with the exception of
judo and taekwondo, originated in either Europe or North
America.
Wushu practitioners in China, numbered around several tens of
millions, view this opportunity as "the first step in a long march
of 10,000 li (5,000 km)," said Zhang.
China has been actively advocating wushu since the early 1980s.
The establishment of the International Wushu Federation (IWUF) in
Beijing in 1991 escalated its global expansion and Olympic
push.
The IWUF was accepted into the General Association of
International Sports Federation in 1994 and fully recognized by the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) in February 2002.
IWUF currently has 114 martial arts associations from five
continents.
(China Daily October 4, 2007)