I was a “green” reporter when the Palarong Pambansa was held in Cebu City in 1994. The personalities that stick in my mind now are former mayor Tomas Osmeña (Cebu City) and Eduardo Gullas (I think he was still a first district solon then). I covered a meeting to supposedly unite Cebu leaders under one goal: snag the national events’ hosting. Millions of pesos were being reserved for the hosts to upgrade venues for the event. Gullas offered an area in Talisay (I could no longer remember where) while Joy Augustus Young, who represented Osmeña in the talks, offered the old Abellana National School oval.
I wasn’t privy to the internal discussions in Cebu City about the Abellana venue, which later became the Cebu City Sports Center after Cebu City snagged the Palaro hosting. But “size” must have been part of these discussions. The venue was small, the reason why the nearby City Central School and the old Abellana National School buildings were affected by the redesign of the venue. The City had to make do with what was available at that time.
The oval was the centerpiece of the entire venue. But aside from the oval, an Olympics-size swimming pool had to be built, while the wooden but big grandstand had to be redesigned also. Still, the Cebu City Sports Center did serve the Palaro’s purpose while ensuring that it would not become a white elephant. It is, after all, right in the heart of a populous metropolis and is not located in an isolated area far from the center.
I don’t know who was in charge of media affairs during the Palaro at that time but all I can remember now is that there were minimal complaints. The media people were housed in a building built beside the oval and the building was open enough for media people to see the goings-on in the rubberized track. If I remember it correctly, one source of a complaint was when Bombo Radyo aired live the activities and the hosts brought with them the drum that they would pound from time to time to stress a point. The booming sound distracted the journalists, especially from the print medium, who usually worked in silence.
The hosting was successful except for one controversy. That was a period when transgenderism was not yet a thing. The participation of an athlete from Luzon in women’s track and field was questioned because the athlete looked like a man. I could not remember now how the Palaro organizers resolved the complaint.
By the way, Cebu produced a track star at that time in a young public school student called Chantal Balani. Sadly, Balani never got to the heights reached by the late Lydia de Vega, the nation’s one and only track superstar. I really don’t know what happened to the girl but her name receded from our collective memories just like our first hosting of the Palaro.
P.S., I could not remember Osmeña, who was, if I recall correctly, the Cebu City mayor at that time, expecting the media coverage of the Palaro to be all-positive. There was no reining-in, sort of.