Go back to medal-rich sports

WITH only a few days left and fewer events to play, where is Team Philippines in the Burma (Myanmar) Southeast Asian Games?

After boxing’s haul of three gold medals, the country had a collection of seven gold, nine silver and 15 bronze medals. In the overall tabulation, only the gold medals count and the Philippines was out of the top five where Indonesia, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam were battling for top honors.

We can complain all we want about the ethnic sports that each host country tries to inject into the program to improve its medal chances. We can also rant about the absence of our regular stomping grounds like bowling and softball but we can’t do much if the host country doesn’t have facilities for these events.

But it is in the medal-rich Olympic events where we still cannot score heavily.  Athletics is still to be fully played out but Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore have invested heavily in the event and should dominate anew. We hope for a few surprises and the birth of new track and field heroes.

Aquatics and athletics remain as the main sources of medals in any multisport international event. For the Philippines, however, the astronomical costs of facilities management, international competitions as well as coaching hinder their development.

What don’t help also are nosy parents, coaches and administrators who add to the intrigues, differences and misunderstandings that hound these sports over the course of the year.

It doesn’t help also that we really don’t get to know the upcoming stars of these disciplines until we read about them in print or online sources. That’s why we had pitched in our last column that our young athletes need to be constantly exposed on television as well so that we get to follow their exploits, win or lose.

The Project: Gintong Alay program of the 1970s and 80s didn’t only hone the talents that were available at the time.  There was an effort as well to get the track and field athletes on television even in the national competitions.  That’s why we got to follow Lydia De Vega, Isidro del Prado, Elma Muros and others. We cheered them on when they represented us in the Asian Games and the Olympics.

Basketball, boxing and now volleyball will remain high-profile events because television keeps them in the public eye.  But better teamwork between the national sports associations of medal-rich sports and television could help produce more winners in international meets in the future.

Even if SEA Games hosts come up with all sorts of games to pad their gold-medal haul.