Question about the Zhenzhou/Shaolin Tourny in Oct this year

[spaz_dragon]

hey gene! it's "kwando girl", lol. it seems as if i'm going as well! man, i'm so nervous. i'm hoping the adreline will overcome my pain in ankle, tee hee. hope to see you there!!!!

[GeneChing]

Awesome! We'll have to hook up! Anyone else from Guolin's coming? I know Jamel was trying to go and was working to try to scrouge up funds.

As for the Shaolin festival, it looks like they will try to integreate this festival and the Shaolin International Festival into one event. Now I should clarify for those who don't know Shaolin and it's magnitude - there are many Shaolin festivals. For instance, the Grade "A" tournament I covered in our Shaolin special 2003 is between the top 25 schools (there is also a Grade "B" tournament which covers the other 55 schools). There is allegedly an internal Temple tournament which I've been trying to see for years. There's even a TKD tournament. But the one that most of us think about is the Shaolin International Festival, which I covered with Martha Burr in our Shaolin Special 2000 (festival 6) and our 2002 special (festival 7). It originally started off as an annual event, and then went to biannual on odd years (our coverage didn't come out until the following year because of publication times - for example, our Nov Dec is on stands now, so they same thing will happen with this event). They cancelled 2003 at the last minute because of SARS. In the past, these tournaments were more for foreigners so you saw all sorts of stuff, modern wushu, traditional, you name it. The schools demonstrated, mostly Taguo, with these huge displays, sometimes up to 1000 synchronized atheletes on the field at once - it's an amazing sight to behold.

We'll see what the future holds for this event. It's the first one, so it's a bit premature to make any predictions.

[spaz_dragon]

hey gene! yes, jamel is coming. so just the 2 of us...this year, tee hee. if we do this next year, i really hope more people can come from our school. it was just bad timing...since most of them are in school, lol. i look forward to seeing you and gigi did you know that jamel and i are stopping off in san francisco?

[GeneChing]

Did you know that your master and my boss talked yesterday about the trip? It looks like we'll be travelling together. You master was kind enough to help us arrange some meetings and such. He even offered to bring some
got qi t-shirts for us as friendship gifts (personally, I don't think the whole 'got qi' thing works in China since they don't drink milk and aren't familiar with the ad campaign). So I'm sure we'll see each other. It'll be fun to hang out with you and Jamel, my shaolin cousins. See you there!

[norther practitioner]

Have fun...

*******z


Yeah, I'm jealous.

[Ego_Extrodinaire]

Hi Gene,

How's your trip going so far? Hope you're having a good time. Please send the full details of the festivals to BL, if you have the itinary even better! If you don't have her contact details, please PM to me and I'll make sure she recieves it in good time.

EE

[Songshan]

Originally posted by Ego_Extrodinaire
I heard , maybe even on this thread that the shaolin festival has been cancelled in lieu of wushu worlds. Is this correct??

I heard of this too and also understand that the Zhenzhou/tourney in Oct is replacing the Shaolin festival. Is this correct or false????

[Ego_Extrodinaire]

unfortunately despite everyones " great efforts" on behalf of shaolin and perpetuating it , the story is true!!!!!

[spaz_dragon]

lol, i can imagine walking around the tournament seeing people wearing the "got qi" shirts...having no idea what it means. it's all good though. that's cool that they're doing that too!

[White_Boy]

Well I got back 2 nights ago from the Zhengzhou Tournament. Over all it was pretty good. Some of the judging was off because as we suspected, it was Wushu judges looking at traditional stylists, but I think in the end most things panned out...

The Shaolin festival on the sunday before the events began was the most amazing diplay of Martial Arts in the history of Martial Arts Demos. It had to be about 20 miles of continuous Kungfu by the different students from the DengFeng Schools. The guides told us it was over 40, 000 martial arts students and over 10,000 volunteers from the town. Not only that but it looked like the rest of the town was there too just to watch as out busses roll by.
The tournament had a total of 62 countries, 160 different teams/groups, and over 2100 competitors!!!

In the end it was worth the trip, dispite the competeing against Wushu people and the strange judging scores. I can't wait to see if they can pull it off next year.

[spaz_dragon]

i totally agree about the shaolin festival. it was the most touching memory for me. they really went all out for this, and i feel proud that i was part of it! the entire experience was awesome!!!! man, i really want to go next time they have one! i heard it's every other year...must train hard!

[GeneChing]

They were supposed to have a Shaolin festival last year but it was cancelled due to SARS. So they should have one next year (2003 then 2005) but it will most probably be postponed because they spent it all for this event. The World Traditionals are planned to be every four years, and a hoping to travel to different countries, like the World Wushu Games. At this point, no other country is willing to try and follow up what Zhengzhou just did, so no one knows what will happen next. We may get another Shaolin festival in 2006. Some postulated that that the World Traditional will stay in Zhengzhou, and it might alternate with the biannual Shaolin festival, but at this point, it's way too early to tell.

Since we have a few threads on the World Trads, I'm going to focus my attention on this one, just to keep it simple.

[Shaolinlueb]

pictures gene, any at all you could share?
I know you take tons of snaps that never make it into the mag. so why not share?

[GeneChing]

I probably will post some but I gotta sift through some 20 hours of footage and five digital memory cards - so it's a lot of stuff. So be patient. Until then, be content with firepalm's thread

ngokfei asked (on this thread) about feedback.

Doc Fai Wong and Jason competed - they registered under Hong Kong but flew USA colors. That was almost grounds for disqualification.

The three sons of Lam Jo (including Lam Chun Fai) competed.

As for golds, anyone scoring in the top 20% of their pool won a gold, top 30% was silver and top 50% was bronze. Although I heard that some people received medals that didn't compete. It was more like the traditional Confucian examination system that the Olympics.

As for who qualified on the USA team, well, that's a huge pandora's box. There were Americans competing on many teams beyond the USA (Americans on Lam Chun Fai's HK team, for example). This happened with several countries. Many independant teams competed and they were more like schools or clubs.

Don't know anything about the Forbidden city.

[ngokfei]

another cluster f...

What kind of tourney has more than 1 gold per division.

By the way, what were the divisions? Anything like
mens southern
mens northern
mens staff
etc.

Just kind of hokey to give out so many medals. And they wonder why Wushu won't make the olympics.

And yeah if your from the states you'd expect to be on the US team. But hey, heard that Sifu Goh had students competing with less then a years expereince, go figure.

Still in all it must of been an awsom event. Wish I was there. To see so many high level sifu's there and to even see them peform/compete.

eric