Tuesday, September 02, 2008 Speak out: The elusive gold By Art E. Cañares
THE Filipino dream of winning that elusive Olympic gold medal became a nightmare in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The debacle was expected. Our great consolation was that the pain of losing was made bearable by the swiftness of our athletes’ defeat.
The 15-man delegation that went to Beijing with a lean budget was a Quixotic misadventure. It highlighted the Filipino’s tendencies of putting up token resistance for the sake of participation.
In retrospect, our hapless athletes were booted out of the Bird’s Nest stadium like nestlings barely able to fly. Not that the Filipinos do not have the ability and will to win. It takes more than just raw courage and lots of prayers to bring the miracle of overcoming the insurmountable obstacles. And these obstacles are in us. In order to win the Olympic gold medal an athlete must have the right genes. The powerful Jamaican sprinters attributed their winning forms in Beijing to the “genes” of the West African ancestors who were born big and strong like the rhinoceros.
I may sound like a sore loser but I still maintain that our debacle at Beijing is attributed to our rich sports patrons whose obsession is confined only to basketball. And because of basketball we lost most of our potential gold medalist. We need big and tall sprinters, swimmers and heavyweight boxers, but where are they? They are all absorbed in basketball—encaged by the rich patrons for personal aggrandizement.
Unless we pass a law regulating the inflow of big athletes to basketball our dream of winning the Olympic gold medal remains bleak.
