Bad script, good sprint

When athletes cry in victory or defeat, the sports arena become a bulwark of genuine human emotions. When lawmakers shed tears in an otherwise august hall, it morphs into a pigsty for ham acting. Raspberry worthy, not Oscars definitely.

No one knows if anyone cried with and for them. It has been about them, not the country. The last time Filipinos cried for the country was probably when Carlos Yulo struck double gold in Paris. For the right reasons. Unfortunately, the country did not feel for the golden boy in his cheap, ugly family feud, and love life. Caveat, cheap and ugly refer only to his domestic conflict, not to his choice of a life partner, evidenced by the use of Oxford comma that separates persons or things enumerated.

Just as there is a separator in sprints, a hundredth or even a thousandth of a second invisible to the naked eye. Fil-Canadian Zion Corrales-Nelson proved a fraction of a second lasts eternity. Recently she ran the century dash in 11.19 seconds in California, just a hundredth of a second faster than the personal best of Singaporean Shanti Veronica Pereira, the current regional sprint queen. Zion also shattered the Philippine record of 11.27 set by Kristina Marie Knott who took a hundredth of a second from the regional record of the great Lydia De Vega.

It is also faster than the 11.23 golden time of a Chinese sprinter in the last Asian Games. Photo finish, if these four women raced against each other at their fastest. But already, officials are faster talking about Zion’s continental leading time as the quadrennial games in Japan approaches, the Olympic equivalent in Asia. But then again, both the starting block and the finish line are in the land of the rising sun in September this year. Neither here now nor in the United States earlier where she ran her fastest.

From now until then, many things could happen, in secret the fastest Asian women train. They hold back until they attack the track. Zion may have peaked too early, might be too early a favorite. She needs to reset her body to reach maximum speed in time for the big time. She has not made that much of an impact in the regionals even. But then again, no one will ever know. One thing is certain though, for now she is faster than Filipino men, including a running man inside a bogus hall.