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Sunday , September 10, 2017
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WE ALL KNOW 24 as the number of gold medals won by our athletes in the recently concluded SEA Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The haul gave us our worst finish since the 1999 SEAG in Brunei (19 gold medals, fifth place) yet the derelicts headlining the country’s governing body for sports merely shrugged the humiliating finish and simply told everyone to move on and prepare for the next Games.
After the “moving on” prompt from the unaffected Philippine Olympic Committee president Jose Cojuangco Jr. comes another one of his sorry disciples almost saying we should be happy Myanmar did not overtake us because our participation was not about medals but rankings. Goodness freaking gracious!
For the sake of Filipino athletes, I do really hope that these species are endangered and nearing extinction. If these aged blokes from the POC are content with a sixth-place finish for the second consecutive time, something is really warped within their geriatric senses.
Jose Romasanta, also an executive of the Cojuangco group of companies, is Peping Cojuangco’s vice president at the POC and – with delicadeza in a galaxy far, far away – heads the National Sporting Agencies for volleyball and karatedo, games where the Philippines failed to get medals at the SEAG.
Volleyball in particular is getting popular in the country that players, especially the ladies, are treated like celebrities. Romasanta should have given justice to his multiple positions and produced at least bronze medals in volleyball and karatedo.
He blamed the people for the flopped 50-medal prediction by a prophet disguised as a national delegation head, saying our expectations were just “a little too high.” Seriously already? We never expected that kind of haul knowing the deep crap Philippine sports is drowning in caused by the crappy senior fogeys wallowing in the cesspool.
Two Joses had been maintaining the quagmire of mediocrity and after every competition, this sports-loving nation gets a refined definition of failure from the two. Like Peping who told us to “move on,” Romasanta said, “If you look at the history, we won like 29 in the past SEA Games. Therefore, 24 is not unusual.”
Yes, it is not unusual because since their reign, except for the time when we hosted the 2005 SEAG and ruled over the rest of the field with 113 gold medals, we had been content in placing between fifth and seventh places. And that assumption qualifies somebody to be a historian and downplay poor performance.
Our athletes, both homegrown and foreign-bred, trained and sacrificed with the sole purpose of winning. Excluding sports where height is might, we can be world-class competitors. Of course, not everybody wins, but it would have been a great consolation had the national sporting agencies and their heads been attentive to their needs. As always, they always find justification in their ineptitude.
We are daring to host the 30th edition of the regional games come 2019, and it would take an act from the heavens to replicate the 2005 golden finish. Because an estimated amount of P1 billion is to be appropriated, fat chance these old farts will be stepping down. Until they’re gone to kingdom come, let’s be content with another lowly finish. No matter the talent and the individual motivation, all will be futile because a senile at the helm makes our athletes inutile.
People had elected sportsmen to Congress yet no concrete reforms or programs were made to address national sports. As senators of the republic, we had Freddie Webb in 1992, then Robert Jaworski in 1998, but bills for the welfare and continuous development and facilities for athletes had been lacking. Manny Pacquiao now sits at the Senate and he had gone through pains as an athlete, figuratively and literally. He’s the logical choice to champion the causes of our national athletes and perhaps do their favorite pastime on the POC – a Senate inquiry. I rest my case./PN
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