While cleaning, Muros-Posadas unearths treasure of medals—and memories

LIGHTING CORNERS OF THE MIND A cleaning session allows Elma Muros-Posadas to look back on a decorated career.”

With time to kill due to being quarantined, Elma Muros-Posadas did general cleaning in her house in Sta. Rosa, Laguna—unearthing a treasure trove of old medals, trophies, pictures, newspaper clippings and even track shoes.

When she did a final inventory, Muros-Posadas, the 53-year-old track and field legend, sorted out more than 500 items that fetched flashbacks of a glorious career that spanned two decades.

“It feels great to revisit them once in a while,” Muros-Posadas told the Inquirer on Friday. “Sometimes it even makes me cry.”

She won’t forger her first one, of course. A gold medal in the 1980 Palarong Pambansa in Tuguegarao.

That following year, at age 14, she saw action in the 1981 Manila Southeast Asian Games, winning a silver in the women’s 4X100-meter relay with a crack team that included fellow legend Lydia de Vega.

“That felt great,” Muros-Posadas said in Filipino. “Because I didn’t imagine getting there at a young age. I came from far away, Magdiwang, Romblon, fifth of nine children.”

Little did she know that she’d be grabbing even more attention, and accolades, down the road.

She wound up winning 15 gold medals in different events in the SEA Games, setting meet records in the process.

Half of a pair of yellow, worn-out Asics Tiger spikes sat on her bed. She wore those shoes when she jumped 6.06 meters—a new record at that time—to capture SEA Games long jump gold in 1983.

The pair’s other half she loaned to Mikee Cojuangco-Jaworski, an Asian Games equestrian champion and the International Olympic Committee representative to the Philippines, as a souvenir.

Muros-Posadas’ last SEA Games gold came in 2001 when she ruled the heptathlon event and cemented her versatility as an athlete.

“We are planning to put it in a big shelf like a mini museum,” said her husband, national coach Jojo Posadas. “But it would not fit even a 5X5 meter wall.”

Even as she has ventured into coaching, Muros-Posadas continued to add to her collection here and there. Her last was a gold medal in long jump from the 2009 Master World championships in Finland.

Muros-Posadas and her husband train athletes in diffe­rent schools. But with the lockdown limitations, they had no choice but to stay home.

“I try to help out people in the front line and those in the subdivision,” she said, waiving rents for her apartment unit nearby. “But most of the time we stay at home.”