WHEN we posted that eSports was now part of the Asian Games and will soon be in the Olympics and that an Olympic gold medal would fetch at least P10 million from the Philippine Sports Commission, someone commented wrly, saying that if his mother didn’t scold him when he skipped school to play computer games as he could have been the country’s rep in the Asian Games.
Then, a few days later, Margielyn Didal won the fourth gold medal--and at least P6 million in incentives--in skateboarding, leading one to say “may pa nag-padayon ko’g skate-skate sa una.”
Skateboarding, too, will be part of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 and if Didal wins the country’s first gold, I think she’ll get more than the P10 million incentive as other institutions will chip in. After her win, Didal said that we should start looking at skateboarding in a different light.
Skaters are nuisance, that’s what majority of the public think and I remember back in 2001, the Cebu Skateboarding Association held an event at Ayala hoping to change that stigma. The group got inactive shortly after that but I think Didal’s win will help put it back in the limelight.
Because I agree with Didal, it’s time we treat skateboarding and eSports as more than tambay sports, but disciplines in which the Filipinos can excel worldwide. Let’s hope the two won’t suffer the fate of billiards, which after the highs of the Efren Reyes-era, it never got rid of the stigma of being a tambay sports.
Esports is a shoo-in for the Olympics and could be a regular event as early as 2024. Why? Consider this, according to one website, global games revenue was at $125 billion dollars and the lobby for the inclusion of the sport will be a well-oiled and well-funded one.
Having it in the Olympics is free marketing for the games publishers who are, I’m sure, counting their profits.
But, like skateboarding, in order for the Cebu eSports community to be taken seriously, it has to form a group, ally itself with the national body (if there is one) so Cebu gamers can take part in the selection process for the national team. I think that’s the reason why we didn’t have an entry in Jakarta, we didn’t have a group that could have sent representatives when the Olympic Council of Asia held its qualifiers early in the year.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we are encouraging students to skip school and spend the whole day playing games or spend the whole day at the skate park. You can combine the two, be a good athlete/gamer and finish school.