SPORTS personalities with quiet aspirations of challenging Jose “Peping” Cojuangco Jr. for the presidency of the Philippine Olympic Committee are not emerging from the shadows before the POC elections on Nov. 26.
Worse, possible rivals seem to have beaten a hasty retreat and are allowing the 82-year-old former Tarlac congressman to win an unprecedented fourth term without breaking a sweat.
Where are the sports leaders with capability, stature and competence who can lead our athletes to Olympic glory and clean up the Aegean stables that many of the national sports associations have become under Cojuangco’s 12-year term?
POC first vice president and spokesperson Joey Romasanta is hurling a challenge to qualified aspirants, a.k.a. incumbent NSA presidents of Olympic sports that have served four years cumulatively to run, saying “nobody is preventing them from aspiring” for Cojuangco’s position.
But sadly, there are no takers for one of the two most powerful positions in local sports, making Groundhog Day a recurring theme at the POC.
The following is a piece we wrote four years ago, egging eligible candidates the likes of sports godfather Manny V. Pangilinan and his able business lieutenant Ricky Vargas to run against Cojuangco. Judge for yourself if the column, slightly edited, still rings true today.
* * *
JOSE Cojuangco Jr., hell-bent on running for a third term as president of the Philippine Olympic Committee despite a horrendous record, could be the real-life version of the Bill Murray character in the movie Groundhog Day.
If you’re less familiar with the film, the Harold Ramis classic stars Murray as an aloof and arrogant weatherman who wakes up on the same day over and over again until he realizes and makes up for the folly of his ways.
With Philippine sports under his watch sinking in what a colleague, Recah Trinidad, calls “a quicksand of mediocrity,” Cojuangco fits the profile of the Murray figure.
The former Tarlac congressman must feel like waking up on the same day repeatedly. But doing what is best for our athletes has never crossed his mind as he continues to ignore the growing clamor for a fresh stewardship of the POC.
In the reel comedy-drama, Murray’s persona is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the world’s best-known groundhog, whose appearance on Feb. 2 each year is an American tradition.
Held captive by a bunch of weird men in top hats at the local library, Punxsutawney Phil is set free temporarily to burrow in the snow in the town square for the most awaited event.
It is said that when the celebrity critter sees its shadow, more harsh winter lies ahead, thus forestalling a streak of sunshine that signals spring and renewal.
There’s no need for nature’s forecaster or some fishwives’ tale to remind us of what lies ahead for Philippine sports in another Cojuangco dispensation.
In Uncle Peping’s eight years in the pilot’s seat, wreckages of our repeated crashes in the Olympics, the Asian Games and even at the glorified barangay league called the Southeast Asian Games are strewn all over the place.
There is an aching desire for a tested batter to step up to the plate to face Cojuangco in the fast-approaching POC elections.