ARE sports officials living in a fantasy world?
Take the forecast of our national sports associations on how many gold medals the Philippines will win in the coming Southeast Asian Games.
In a recent meeting called by the president of the Olympic Committee and the chairman of the Philippine Sports Commission, the NSA chiefs boldly predicted the country will garner 220 gold medals and win the overall championship to boot.
Truly, these are bold predictions. But will it happen? I have my doubts. Here’s why:
The Philippines, in its most recent SEA Games outing, won 23 gold medals in 2017 (Malaysia), its worst tally in SEA Games history. In 2015 (Singapore), the haul was 29, and in the 2013 SEA Games (Myanmar), also 29. Thus, in the last three SEA Games, over a period of six years, the country won only a total of 81 gold medals. Over the same period, the Philippines was sixth place twice and fifth one time.
With that record, are we now to believe that, in a span of two years, with no sign of any significant progress in any area of sports competition, our athletes will manage to win 200 more gold medals than they did in 2017?
Maybe our officials know something I don’t. Maybe our athletes are being fed with secret food that will make them run faster, jump higher, be stronger.
Or maybe they’re undergoing intense psychological brain conditioning to tell them they can do it and that the odds don’t matter. Or maybe it’s our officials who’ve been going through conditioning?
I guess the real reason behind this optimism is that the country is playing host to the Games. History shows that host countries normally win a bucketful of medals. In the last nine SEA Games, for instance, six host countries, including the Philippines in 2005, won the overall championship.
It’s likely that local sports officials are hoping history will repeat itself. Thus, the unprecedented optimism that has caught even top officials by surprise.
So why are these NSA officials making these unbelievable predictions? My guess is they want to impress the POC and PSC top brass, who have a history of only wanting to hear good news.
They want to impress upon POC and PSC officials that they’re doing their jobs. They want to assure the brass that the money given to them for training, foreign exposure, hiring of foreign coaches, acquiring state-of-the-art sports equipment have all been well spent.
Training the athletes alone has cost P1 billion, bigger than the amount set aside for athletes in the past three Olympics and Asian Games combined.
One billion pesos for training, if I may say so, is simply too much for a campaign that will have very little impact in the wider scheme of sports. After all, who cares about the SEA Games? The real battle is in the Asian Games and the Olympics. For instance, how many of the 1,115 Filipino athletes competing in the SEA Games will qualify for the Asiad and Olympics where the real measure of athletic feat is?
Anyway, my take is that the country will be lucky if it wins 100 gold medals. Placing third overall, I believe, is a more realistic target; second place is a bonus; and, if by a quirk of circumstance, we become overall champs, that is a welcome miracle.
POC president Bambol Tolentino was obviously delighted by the medal projection. He inherited a dysfunctional POC peopled by overstaying, unproductive, selfish non-visionaries more interested in getting a share of the huge PSC budget than in building a wide base of young athletes.
With a team like that which Tolentino has, fears abound that the country will be in for a shock. The Thais, the Malaysians, the Vietnamese, and the Indons, not to mention the Singaporeans, have all been sharpening their knives for their attack on Manila.
If you look at the roster of top officials running the NSAs today, the list is hardly inspiring. One will see that most are the same ones who presided over the country’s most embarrassing sports campaigns of the past decade in the SEA Games, Asian Games, and Olympics.
Why they remain in leadership positions is actually not a mystery. There are just too many perks to being a sports official. There’s travel, allowances, prime seats in international events, constant meetings abroad. All for free. Who wants to give these up?
But Tolentino and chief of mission Butch Ramirez, chairman of the PSC, have no choice but to accept the cards dealt them. So when the NSAs promised them the moon, they swooned.
“if we can reach that number of golds that I’m talking about, it will be enough to capture the title,” said Tolentino, whose own projection is a “modest” 180 gold medals.
In contrast, a top PSC official, who does not wish to be identified because he does not want to sound unpatriotic, said the country will be lucky to place third overall. “Overall champion?” he said. “Not even in my wildest dreams.”
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