Waiting begins

And now the waiting begins.

The curtains have come down on the 18th Asian Games in Indonesia, and at this time, we should be hearing from our sports officials their own evaluation of their performances and what to do next.

If I hear the same like it was a learning experience for those who failed to come up with a good performance, I will be disappointed, but let me clear that what I mean by a good performance is just not winning a medal. I know for a fact that in some events, our athletes were facing world class, world ranked athletes, either individual or team sports.

Coming up with a personal best time or weight or order of finish in the end, these are the other measures of performance for athletes and this I believe is how our officials should assess their performances and not come up with alibis.

If a team was given the necessary training, including trips abroad to prepare for the Asian Games but still failed to give a good account of themselves, then what should be evaluated is the training program given to the athletes.

I will cite an example of a team failing to bring home a medal but still can come home with heads up high, triathlon, where our athletes cracked the top ten and still maintained their being ahead of all their South East Asian rivals. In this sport, definitely we are not at par with the Japanese, Chinese, Hong Kong and Kazakhstan athletes, and losing to them does not come as a surprise.

It is the same thing, let us say for women’s softball. This team has steadily improved its world ranking, number 15 now, and they lost to higher ranked teams like Japan and Chinese-Taipei in Indonesia.

But then take the case of bowling, a sport that we used to dominate before. We failed to win a single medal, this despite a supposedly close to P9 million training fund for the team. The need is to review the training program again because whatever it was, it did not work.

But then bowling is one of several sports where there are two groups fighting for the leadership position in the sport and it will not surprise anyone that this situation will be detrimental for any sport, the same thing that happened to swimming which offers a lot of medals at stake but we also did not see a podium finish nor did I hear of a new record set.

Athletics was confident it will bring home medals in the Asiad, but like bowling, nada, and if it is true that one official spin for this performance was the Asian games stint was a good tune-up for the 2019 Sea Games, that is lot of bullshit. One does not use a major event to tune up for a minor event, excuse me.

One looks at the Sea Games as a steppingstone for the Asian Games and not the other way around. And to think that Patafa supposedly got more than adequate funding both from the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) and the private sector, yes I will concede that other Asian countries really outrank us in athletics. But then, we should at least see improved performances in terms of new personal best times or new national records.

If you are into social media, it is full of recriminations, insults, challenges, blame games after the Asian Games. And even if some of those who post do not know what they are talking about and just commenting, there are those who come up with really very intelligent assessments of what is happening in Philippine sports.

This is why I am saying now is really the best time to do that honest-to-goodness objective evaluation of what happened in the Asian Games, from what worked to what did not, and from there, craft new directions and adapt new ways.

If we want different results, we need to see different ways of doing things, otherwise, do not expect much come the Sea Games.