Sunday, August 26, 2007 Six-year-old tanker hoards eight golds
KAREN Mae Indaya is showing definite potential to make it big in the future as she steered the Cebu Blue Marlins-University of Cebu swim club into salvaging the third overall placing in the 106th Silliman University Foun-ders Day National Age Group Competition, which wrapped up yesterday in Dumaguete City.
The six-year-old sensation of Labangon Elementary School upstaged her older and more experienced counterpart as she collected a total of eight gold medals in the tournament.
Meanwhile, also contributing to CBM-UC’s winning the third place are the UC swimmers, who made a last minute dash at the close of the tournament.
Yesterday, the UC tankers ended their bids and won the bulk of the team’s seven gold medals, seven silvers and four bronzes won in the last day. The entire Cebu team rounded up their campaign with a 17-12-16 gold-silver-bronze medal tally.
“It is already good considering that we are a very small team,” said head coach Rolando Alvarez.
Alvarez said they were supposed to send more swimmers for the competition, but a number were down with fever on the day they were supposed to leave.
One of his top bets, Diane Cañeda, had to skip the tournament because of conflict in her schedule with school and a handful of other swimmers were not able to join because of budget constraints.
Marlon Galo, Jeffrey Yana and Noel Cañeda led the Cebuanos’ gold medal rush as they wrapped up their bid with two gold medals each. Cañeda also has two silvers and a bronze medal.
Paula Abigail Vega, on the other hand, suffered a gold medal shutout, but managed to snag five silvers in the 400-meter, 200m, 100m and 50m freestyle and a bronze in the 50 m backstroke. Mary Arlette Baller contributed three silver medals won in the 200 m and 100 m freestyle and 50 m backstroke.
Anthony Linn Navarro, who already has three silver medals, still refused to go home without a gold medal. Before bidding the tournament goodbye, Navarro snagged a gold medal after winning the 50 m freestyle event in the Boys 9-10 age group.
The younger swimmers finished with exploits of their own. (MCB)
