Padyak Pinoy on May 17?: pag chur mo oy!

Marian Baring of SunStar asked last week if the 16 Visayas and Mindanao riders, who passed the April 1 test handled by DOS1 to the 2007 Padyak Pinoy Tour were all taken for a ride by the organizers. The lady scribe also would like to know if it was an April Fools gag pulled off by DOS1.

Last year, UCAP, a new group that positioned itself as PNCA’s (Paquito Rivas’ group and the group that has been running the Tour Pilipinas for years now) rival and Tour Pilipinas savior, held a January elimination for their so called "Dream Tour." A total of 80 riders were selected and prepared for a ghost tour. A few weeks later, PNCA held it’s own eliminations and barred riders, who qualified for the Dream Tour from joining their race. While PNCA did push through with its race last summer, the race was pared down to seven stages from the original 10 days allegedly without the knowledge of the major sponsor, Tanduay. Because of this intentional or unintentional fiasco, the prize money was handed out one month after the last rider crossed the finish line!

Fast forward to this year. UCAP has become a sad footnote and PNCA is barely keeping its head over water. So maybe for lack of finances, PNCA hitched their eliminations to a race in Tagaytay, selecting 80 riders out of the 300 participants. Now a lot of Cebuano riders were planning to go to Tagaytay for the elims but thought better of staying home when it was announced that an elimination will be held for the Vis-Min riders.

The only problem with the Vis-Min elimination was that PNCA wanted nothing about it. In fact, Paquito Rivas text me March 25 that, "Ang PNCA ay hindi makikialam sa karera sa Cebu". Former Tour Pilipinas winner Victor Espiritu also wondered out loud over the internet where the qualifiers of the Vis-Min elims will be distributed among the teams when the 12 teams for Padyak Pinoy (PP) had already been formed.

Yet, DOS1 and Gary Cayton proceeded with the elimination without PNCA, the technical arm of the PP. (I don’t quiet understand the relationship between DOS1 and PNCA within PP but I presume that DOS1 is the marketing arm while PNCA takes care of the technical aspect of the race.) Instead of the PNCA, DOS1 asked the group of Joe Deresas to handle the race. What is interesting here is that according to some sources, Deresas, who was a member of last years’ PNCA Board, was in Rivas’s doghouse after he jumped ship to UCAP last year.

Now, news is that there is no sponsor for the 16 Vis-Min riders, meaning that what Rivas and Espiritu speculated were true: that the PP peloton had already been made up. This scenario was bolstered by Cesar Labramonte, a PNCA board member and former RP team coach, who said the same thing last week. Labramonte also said that the PNCA will meet (last) Saturday, to "clear the air". But what drives me crazy is why the PNCA waited 34 days after the elims and just 13 days before the start of PP to "clear the air". Isn’t it that everything about PP should have been ironed out months before?

Finally, and more importantly, I still have to hear over the radio, TV, newspaper, internet and through "radio baba" that PP 2007 has a title sponsor. I’m not surprised that Tanduay distanced itself from the race and it won’t surprise me either if there is no taker. No half-assed business group would throw money and the company’s good name in a race organization whose people doesn’t even know the roles each department plays and contradict each other like they look forward to it.

While I have this gut feeling that this PP won’t happen, I fervently hope that it will happen. The summer race has been a fixture in our culture for more than 5 decades. Besides, it would be unfair for our athletes who put in a great amount of time and effort just to be able to have a little wealth and a lifetime of fame in this event.

And I don’t know what Philcycling, the absentee federation, has to say about this. This is their turf, BTW. But to answer Marian’s question, April Fools just don’t happen every April 1 for pro cycling, the joke is a daily thing.