Glacier-like pace of SEA Games organizing continues

Finally, a joint Southeast Asian Games task force to select members of Team Philippines for the sub-continental athletic meet has been formed.

That’s one less worry for busy sports officials with more chores to do and more requirements to meet before the country hosts the 30th edition of the biennial multisports event.

Competitions in 56 sports will be played Nov. 30 to Dec. 13 with venues in Clark Field and Manila serving as main hubs.

Although known as an inferior sports conclave, the SEA Games exists and is popular and furnishes the hosts and the 10 other countries bragging rights as they compete against each other under the shadows of Asia’s sports superpowers.

The five-person task force from the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) and the Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) is headed by SEA Games chief of mission Mansour Del Rosario and will fast-track the selection, training and preparation of our standard bearers.

Although, vexed by the final composition of Team PH, Del Rosario came out with a candid view that gunning for the overall championship—always conspiratorially coveted by the host country—requires strategy.

Translation: Our athletes have to win gold medals even if we have control over the sports to be played and the events to be included.

Del Rosario’s group is up and running, but sports executives are still faced with the glacier-like pace of organizational activities.

With eight months to go, the Philippine SEA Games Organizing Committee (Phisgoc) can’t seem to get things straight, according to sources at the PSC and the POC.

Instead of organizing, it is creating disorder, said a POC source who noted that at one point the Phisgoc was negotiating with a Chinese-Spanish consortium for the broadcasting of the Games without the knowledge of POC president Ricky Vargas.

“Negotiating and then informing Vargas after the fact, that’s a bleeping mess,” said the source.

“The role of the Phisgoc chair is to raise money and help,” said a PSC source. “That’s a job the PSC and POC can do without delay.”

Sources at both agencies also said disconcerting talk is abuzz that inexperienced executives handpicked by chair Alan Peter Cayetano to run the entity are receiving salaries ranging from P140,000 to P350,000 a month.

As I write this, text messages to Phisgoc chief operating officer Tats Suzara remained unanswered.

And since Cayetano’s committee has no war chest of its own because of Commission on Audit guidelines among other issues, says the PSC source, it has to rely on the government’s sports funding agency and the caretaker of the P5-billion (down from P7.5 billion) SEA Games budget to finance Phisgoc’s activities.

As first reported by Tribune scribe Julius Manicad, documents showed that Vargas gave the Phisgoc P7.2 million (covered by a promissory note, confirmed the POC source) to cover the salaries of its employees now reportedly numbering 240 and counting for the month of January alone.