POC: No Asiad stint for paddlers

MANILA—Amid allegations of time-trial fraud, the dragonboat teams won’t be seeing action in the Guangzhou Asian Games, after all.   The Philippine Olympic Committee executive board on Friday decided to delist the men’s and women’s teams from the country’s Asiad delegation roster after expressing “serious concerns over the procedures and references used in the trials.”   In a statement, POC chair Monico Puentevella said the time trials, held by the Philippine Dragonboat Federation and supervised by the Olympic body, did not accurately reflect the condition of the two teams.   It stopped short of saying, though, that the results of the time trials—in which the men’s and women’s paddlers surpassed Asian Championships standards by as fast as seven seconds—were fixed to ensure that the teams qualified for the Asiad.   “The board maintained that the time trial results reflected that our dragonboat teams are not in the best shape for the Asian Games considering the quality of the competition,” Puentevella said.   A POC official was quoted in a television news interview Thursday night that they seriously doubted the accuracy of the time-trial results, claiming they were “unbelievably fast.”   Philippine Dragonboat Federation technical director and head coach Nestor Ilagan declined to comment on his crew’s delisting. He only said that POC monitors, led by Jeff Tamayo of soft tennis, were present during the Oct. 9 trials at La Mesa Dam.   “Our objective is to improve our athletes-to-medal ratio in China, and we are hopeful that this can be achieved with the size of our delegation,” said Asiad chief of mission Joey Romasanta.   With the 44-man dragonboat teams out of the team, the Philippine delegation will thus have 196 athletes for the Games.