Limpag: Most Valuable Person in Team Visayas

HAD there been just one mis-step—just one—Visayas would have finished second again to NCR for the fourth consecutive time in the Milo Little Olympics national finals. That's how close the contest held recently in Laguna was.

Every medal mattered, heck, every fourth place finish mattered as only 2.5 points separated Visayas and NCR in the overall tally. Cliche as it may sound, the words "total team effort" have never rung truer than this year's Visayas team, because that was what it was.

And surprisingly, one of the biggest contributions this year for Visayas happened off court; it wasn't achieved by an athlete but a member of the staff through the stroke of the pen.

Having hosted the Milo Visayas regional finals for 19 years, and three editions of the national finals, the staff of Visayas can compute the championship points with their eyes closed, something officials of the Palarong Pambansa can't do even if armed with the latest gadgets. It's easy to compute the points for ball games, where you only have the top three to account for, but for individual events like swimming, where each single athlete's ranking up to the sixth place gets a corresponding point and these in turn gets tallied to determine the overall rank?

It gets complicated. So complicated that in the Palaro, which used a similar system until last year, one official once told me not to bother asking about something they know nothing about. But back to Milo. Visayas officials keep an unofficial tally of their own because they know how, unlike the other delegations and based on their own tally, they were trailing NCR by two points with only taekwondo left to count for in the final day.

Then someone noticed something: Visayas earned only 10 points instead of 15 for winning in gymnastics. So off they went to a huddle. And what an important huddle it was as it gave the Visayas the five-point swing it needed to beat NCR by 2.5 points; the closest margin in seven stagings.

Whoever noticed that discrepancy, his or her attention to detail was just as valuable as Mario Ceniza's last-gasp equalizer against NCR in the secondary football finals, one that earned Visayas 30 points in the tally.

Milo awards an outstanding athlete for each event, I hope whoever found out that discrepancy gets a MOA of his own; the staff just saved Milo a potential embarrassment, a face-palm moment.

What if they found out the error after the event?

Thanks to Visayas’ MVP, Milo got spared and Visayas ended NCR’s three-year reign.

(www.mikelimpagblog.wordpress.com)

Trending

No stories found.

Just in

No stories found.

Branded Content

No stories found.
SunStar Publishing Inc.
www.sunstar.com.ph