Why aren’t we winning?

Watching the Japanese win their nth Olympic gold medal in Judo on cable made me sigh,
"Lucky them," I said to myself. I stayed awake in the wee hours just to watch the swimming finals in my mom’s bedroom; so odd that she didn’t wake up even if the Japanese announcers were shouting in a mad frenzy upon winning gold for the 100-meter breaststroke for men, which came as a banzai feat when everyone thought it would be the Caucasians who would harvest the medals. But it seems winning the Olympic gold has become second nature to the Japanese; even if I found their "Hello-Kitty-ish" get-up during the Parade of Nations a bit cute and childlike, they really do go for the prowl. And as I write this, Thailand has already secured for itself two gold medals (women’s weightlifting). All we can do is cringe in envy. This year’s Olympics has simply passed us by.

Even if I suddenly had an urge to head out for the beach when I saw the athletes from countries like American Samoa and Vanuatu during the parade of athletes, reality sank in when the games started. Then the question hit me, why aren’t we winning? Well, it sounded better than, "Why are we losing?" But one can’t answer this question just pinning the blame on just anyone. The answer perhaps may not come to us in years to come, or if it does come to us, acting on them will take years.

That’s why I guess Filipinos don’t really follow the Olympics anymore since we know what the gloomy outcome will be, though it’s kinda disheartening that our athletes don’t get much support. Maybe one reason why we don’t really have a good showing is that the country is so enamored with basketball, which to me, is a deadend sport for Filipinos. Though there’s nothing wrong with loving the sport, it is just that we can’t reap medals in that sport. Except perhaps in the SEA Games. But then again most countries in the ASEAN are hooked on football. Basketball can only go as far as entertaining us, and in these times we do need some form of entertainment.

So what should a cash-strapped country like ours do? Even the prospects for Beijing 2008 might seem bleak. 2008 will be more a competitive Olympiad than 2004. Maybe the most practical thing to do is for people to be exposed to a variety of sports, and see how it goes. The Chinese are taking the alternative route by focusing on the less popular sports. They’re investing in shooting since they have seen you can harvest a lot of gold medals there (thanks to Time magazine for the info). Well at least we got lucky in badminton. Given a few years time we might just be great in the sport – Indonesia got gold in Athens this year. In times when things don’t really go too well, we do the blame game.

It has been some time since the government had a good sports program. But we should not rely only on the government if we want to shake things up; I guess it’s up to us, to do something about it, taking small steps is the way to go. We have a lot of work to do. We aren’t really an athletic country to begin with and athletes aren’t on the top of our list when it comes to "hero material" – excluding basketball players and boxers. Whining and blaming is something we don’t really need right now.

There’s no quick solution to bag the medals, but maybe once the lesser known sports are given an opportunity to shine and they develop a following, we might get somewhere. It’s in the lesser known sports that we have a chance to win medals.

Sports have a way of unifying a nation. The countries that win the gold have a sense of nationalism. Perhaps we don’t, not in Athens, not even in our own backyard.

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E-mail the author at ketsupluis@hotmail.com.