POC needs leadership with direction

The POC election is held every Olympic year.
London will play host to the Olympic Games from July 27 to Aug. 12, just like it did when it staged the summer sports spectacle in 1947 to celebrate the end of World War II.
Recently, Inquirer sportswriter June Navarro reported that incumbent Philippine Olympic Committee president Jose “Peping” Cojuangco was seeking another term—his third in a row since becoming the country’s amateur sports czar in 2004.
“So far,” Navarro wrote, “no opposition has come forward to challenge Cojuangco’s bid for another four-year term. Cojuangco narrowly retained his post by two votes over former shooting chief Art Macapagal during the 2008 POC elections.”
Being an uncle of President Aquino, the 79-year-old Cojuangco is a formidable candidate with his proven clout and influence in both the private and public sectors.
This is no brief for the POC head, but who will dare fight him for the country’s top Olympic post? Now tell me, is there anyone else?
Praised and pilloried at the same time, Cojuangco’s administration was a wildly mixed combination of sporting highs and lows.
The Philippines won the overall championship in the Southeast Asian Games for the first time in 2005, when Manila hosted the SEA Games. However, the Philippines suffered a shocking setback, dropping to a lowly sixth place in last year’s 26th SEA Games in Jakarta, its worse finish since 1977.
Also, under Cojuangco, Filipino athletes won a few gold medals in 2006 and 2010 Asian Games, but they returned home without winning a single Olympic medal from the 2004 Games in Athens and in 2008 in Beijing.
He is also disadvantaged by the fact that he is a true-blue politician being a former congressman from Tarlac and brother of the late former President Corazon Aquino, mother of President P-Noy.
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“It’s time we abandon our colonial mentality that imported cocks, especially those coming from the United States, are far better than our locally bred ones,” once said sportsman-cock breeder Rey Briones.
A former colleague at the Evening Post, the soft-spoken Briones is doing well in the 2012 World Slasher 8-Cock Cup at the Smart Araneta Coliseum.
A virtual newcomer in cockfighting in 2003, he emerged surprise co-winner with veteran Matt Bitanga during that year’s World Slasher Cup-2 by fielding his homegrown Spartan cocks. Last June, Briones shared the WSC-2 championship with Boy Jiao and former Rizal governor Ito Ynares and Rikki Reyes.
In this year’s kickoff leg, Briones is on track to winning the crown over the star-studded field that includes former champion and old timer Ray Alexander of Alabama, Mike Formosa of Hawaii and Louisiana’s Wilbert LeBanc and Richard Harris, among others.
The last time a foreigner or a Fil-Am captured the World Slasher Cup was in January 2009 when the MJRG Group from Chicago, made up of balikbayan cockers Roly Gabon, Rodel Costales and Jorge Torres, reigned supreme.
Home teams have been dominating the international derby scene here in the past two years.