Boxers again banner Olympic hopes
FILIPINO athletes aspiring to qualify for the 2016 Olympics are in a race against time.
With barely a year before the Summer Games, the hopefuls are huffing and puffing their way to international tournaments that serve as embarkation points to Brazil.
Wannabe Olympians in boxing, taekwondo, shooting, athletics, golf, BMX racing, weightlifting and basketball are hard at work because their clock runs out in July to directly and indirectly book tickets to Rio de Janeiro.
The specter of not having enough qualifiers, or worse, having only a solitary athlete making up the country’s contingent hangs like a dark cloud over our coming Olympic stint.
With the Aug. 5 opening of the Games just around the bend, we have a grand total of one athlete—trackster Eric Cray—qualified to compete.
But Philippine Olympic Committee First Vice President Joey Romasanta is not reacting with sepulchral silence.
The PH chief of mission to the Brazil Games is not worried yet about our steep slope to Rio.
With a booming confidence in his voice, Joey says a joint effort by the government and the corporate sector to support potential qualifiers should result in more berths, and an air of satisfaction all around for national sports associations with Olympic candidates.
For perspective, we were able to send 15 athletes to the Beijing Games in 2008 and 11 athletes—the smallest in our 91 years of Olympic presence—to London in 2012.
Our diminishing number of participants not only highlights the increasing difficulty in gaining passage to the greatest sports show on earth.
The dearth of capable aspirants speaks volumes about the mediocre programs ran by many NSAs under the POC’s roof and are funded with a bean counter’s attitude by the Philippine Sports Commission.
Romasanta says “when the blame game starts, it is not the NSAs, but the POC that catches flak,” a mindset that sparks the country’s Olympic body at times to dip its fingers into the NSAs’ business.
Take the case of boxing where Romasanta says it would have been the better part of valor to ask famous professional trainers like Freddie Roach and Nacho Beristain first to impart the game’s “finer points” to our top ring fighters.
Although they are traditionally the strongest hopes for an Olympic medal—including the elusive first gold—the boxers still have to qualify for Rio.
The POC executive says the Association of Boxing Alliances in the Philippines should have given the name coaches the right of refusal before hiring an unheralded Briton to train the boxers on a trial basis.
Christopher Cain, the 45-year-old coach from Liverpool, England, is a mere blimp in the POC’s radar but has earned the maximum three star rating by the Aiba, the International Boxing Federation.
In any case, Abap executive director Ed Picson says 11 boxers, eight male, three female, are left standing to banner the quest for more Olympic slots.
These are light flyweights Roger Ladon and Anthony Barriga, a London Olympian, flyweights Rey Saludar and Ian Clark Bautista, bantamweight Mario Fernandez, lightweights Charly Suarez and Junel Cantanco, welterweight Felix Marcial, flyweights Josie Gabuco and Irish Magno, and lightweight Nesty Petecio.
The boxers are training at the PSC’s training facility in Baguio City.
