The sport of ice hockey is becoming more and more popular in Beijing. There are currently 96 ice hockey teams and 2,000 professional ice hockey athletes in the city, officials said on Wednesday.

Liu Ge, the vice president of the Beijing Ice Hockey Association, told China.org.cn that this sport has a 60-year history in Beijing.

For example, Tsinghua University's subsidiary elementary school has an ice hockey team which was founded in 1953. The school's team now has 25 members. Officials from the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, the Zhangjiakou Education Bureau, the Yangqing County government and schools showed reporters around at an ice hockey court inside the Qinghe Huarun Wucaicheng Living Mall in Beijing where young ice hockey athletes are trained.

But Liu told reporters that there are only 12 rinks in Beijing can be used for ice hockey training, and only 5 of them are real standard ice hockey rinks. "I hope that more and more courts will open to accommodate the public needs and our needs for training and competition because the sport is becoming more and more popular," Liu said. "As far as I know, the current court operators are making good money."

Liu also hoped to establish four professional ice hockey teams under the name of four Chinese universities in the future to further promote this sport in schools and in order to give teenagers prospects and goals to complete the talent training chain. Now that China is bidding to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, winter sports have become a hot topic among citizens in the two cities.

Huang Kan, a commissioner of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, said the bid for the Winter Olympics will definitely give ice hockey a boost and will promote other winter sports in schools, which will also benefit students' character building and physical health. He expects social organizations to participate more in the winter sports promotion campaign.

"The Olympics is not just a furious competition during a particular period of time every four years," added Pei Dongguang, the director of the Olympic Education Research Center at the Capital Institute of Physical Education. "It is an ongoing educational campaign. We made full use of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to launch the biggest Olympic education campaign in the world, involving 460 million students. The bid for the Winter Olympic will be another chance to promote Olympic culture and spirit. So I expect that the schools will regard Olympic education as an important cultural complement to the average physical education class and will incorporate it into their curricula."

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