A time for change

Jose “Peping” Cojuangco Jr

On Sept. 21, a group of sports officials and aficionados are going to stage a rally in the hope of gaining enough momentum to push for major changes in Philippine sports.

A disastrous campaign in the 2017 Kuala Lumpur Southeast Asian Games lit the wick of the protest, which started out as a rising tide of discontent over the leadership of Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) president Jose “Peping” Cojuangco.

And Cojuangco’s nonchalant dismissal of the country’s poor performance in Kuala Lumpur only fanned his critics’ ire.

“All of us, including the critics, should rally behind the 2019 Philippine hosting [of the SEA Games] and support our athletes in any way we can,” said Cojuangco in a statement.

But before the Philippines can move on, before the country’s hosting of the SEA Games in 2019—which puts the Philippines in good shape to win the overall crown—deflects attention from the root of our sporting problems, there is much to figure out about the recent debacle of Team Philippines.

“It’s not something to be happy about,” PSC Chairman Butch Ramirez told the Inquirer in a recent interview. “It’s another learning lesson, but a painful one. We have to give specific prescriptions immediately, strategies, because after the Southeast Asian Games, we have to be ready with clear policies with our partners.”

The SEA Games may be the lowest form of multisport competition, but it is the first step to the real goal of finally winning an Olympic gold. And it is the first place to look at if Ramirez intends to figure out what “painful lesson” there is to learn from our latest failure.

Cojuangco assumed leadership of the POC in 2004. The following year, the Philippines hosted the SEA Games and won the overall championship, but a lot of credit also goes to the previous administration under Celso Dayrit. After all, preparations for the Manila Games were already in motion when Cojuangco was elected to the POC top post.

Since 2005, however, the country has experienced a marked decline in performance in the SEA Games.

In 2007, the Philippines won 41 gold medals out of 475 at stake (8.63%). In 2009, that number dipped to 38 out of 374 at stake (10.16%). In 2011, that further dropped to 36 out of 554 (6.5%) while in 2013, it was 29 out of 461 (6.21%). The country again won 29 gold medals, too, out of 402 offered (7.21%) in 2015 before collecting 24 in 2017 out of 404 golds at stake (5.94%).

“That’s too few gold medals for the amount that we spent. We haven’t improved at all,” lamented sprint icon Lydia de Vega-Mercado in a phone interview from Singapore with the Inquirer. Mercado won nine gold medals in the SEA Games and her 100-meter dash time (11.28 seconds) is still the region’s standard 30 years later.

“It’s sad to watch the country fall so low.”

Only twice before had the Philippines finished with a gold count of 24 or less. But on both occasions, the gold medals at stake where far less than the number dangled in Kuala Lumpur.

In 1979 in Indonesia, the Philippines won 24 out of 227 gold medals (10.57%). In 1999 in Brunei, Team Philippines collected 20 golds out of 233 at stake (8.58%).

The SEA Games calendar, however, is wildly inconsistent, with host countries looking for an upper hand in the race for the overall crown usually throwing in events where it has strong chances of landing a gold. Thus, there is a need to look at the country’s performance in Olympic events included in the SEA Games.

The numbers also show a downward trend.

After winning 32 of the 409 Olympic-event golds in 2007, The Philippines fell to 31 the following SEA Games, although it collected a bigger percentage because there were fewer Olympic events in 2009.

The country won 20 Olympic events in the 2011 SEA Games, 22 in 2013 (percentages not available due to several data discrepancies), 23 out of 300 (7.67 percent) in 2015 and 19 of 280 (6.79%) this year.

The catch here is that even the Olympic events in the SEA Games vary depending on the host country’s strengths and availability of athletes in such events. But the trend somehow reflects our performance in the Summer Games—the country has won just one medal (Hidilyn Diaz, silver, Rio de Janeiro) in the last five Olympics, four of them under Cojuangco’s leadership.

And some key figures of the planned Sept. 21 protest hope that change starts from the top.

“It’s a call for the POC to call for a [general assembly] and call for a democratic elections,” said PSC commissioner Ramon Fernandez, Cojuangco’s fiercest critic.

Fernandez has also accused Cojuangco of alleged corruption (the basketball great continues brandishing documents showing the Commission on Audit questioning Cojuangco’s spending of public funds) and “bad politics.”

“There will always be politics in sports. After all, we get our budget from government. But there is good politics and there is bad politics,” Fernandez explained, adding that Cojuangco’s politics is divisive and exclusive.

“And it is the athletes who suffer.”

It was no surprise that when the Inquirer asked a current track star and a swimming prodigy a seemingly innocent question on what their wish for their sport was, their innocent answers hinted of the need for unity and inclusion.

“My wish is that we become open to change,” said marathoner Mary Joy Tabal, whose gold medal kicked off the country’s paltry haul in Kuala Lumpur. “There are no bad programs but it’s more on adopting changes, new inputs for sports. Let’s not limit our programs. Let’s welcome new ideas.”

“My wish is that the government provide equal opportunities for aspiring swimmers like me to represent the country in international competitions regardless of group affiliation,” said young swimmer Kyla Soguilon.

Soguilon’s tone may have been more wishful than anything else, but the reality of her sport lends an urgent relevance to her statement: If there is one discipline that proves the ill-effects of bad politics, it is swimming, which has not won a gold medal in the last four editions of the SEA Games.

Swimming has been split by a power struggle between two groups, resulting in the ostracizing of swimmers not belonging to the association under Cojuangco’s POC.

There are other solutions, sure, other than a change of leadership, that could rescue Philippine sports.

In a country where funding is a perennial problem (Note: The delegation to Malaysia was one of the most well-funded teams sent to the SEA Games; for 2017, the NSA that got the most financial help from the PSC was swimming, which received at least P18 million), sports leaders need to channel a huge portion of the PSC funds to an elite set of athletes with the goal of winning the Philippines’ first Olympic gold.

“The plan is to have groupings of sports according to tiers,” Fernandez told the Inquirer. “Tier one will have sports that focus mostly on skills and talent, where height and heft don’t matter, and this tier will receive a bulk of the funding because this is our best chance of winning an Olympic gold.”

Still, it will require a strong political will to pacify sports associations that will be relegated to the lower tiers. And if sports leaders focus on retention of positions more than crafting a long-term, feasible and sustainable national program, then the decline will continue.

And that’s a sad reality.

The country is littered with athletes who push themselves beyond the limit. Aries Toledo needed to be stretchered out of playing venues after almost every discipline in the decathlon event in the recent SEA Games. But he endured and brought home a dramatic gold medal. Nikko Huelgas and Kim Mangrobang ruled the triathlon event in such dominating fashion, their closest pursuers where their own teammates.

Boxer John Tupas Marvin won hearts with his take-no-prisoners approach to the gold medal.

And then there are the likes of the swimmer Soguilon, young prodigies waiting in the wings hoping to cut through political barriers to get their shot at representing the country.

When a sporting program has this many heroes in its midst and still continues to move at a crawling pace, then the change needed must be somewhere at the top.

(The Inquirer tried to get the side of POC president Jose “Peping” Cojuangco for this report but could not get a clear line due to technical communication difficulties. Cojuangco is in Turkmenistan for the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games. He promised to grant an Interview to the Inquirer on the 20th, a day before the planned protest against his leadership.)