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)