POC rows
The against-all-odds triumph of the Philippine Dragon Boat Team showcased the best of the Filipino, while the Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) demonstrated the worst. Taking home five golds and two silvers, the paddlers almost missed joining the International Dragon Boat Federation (IDBF) World Championship because its mother association, the Philippine Dragon Boat Federation (PDBF) was stripped of its status and funding as a national sports association by the POC.
The wrangling among sports officials and associations is nothing new. Historically, sportsmanship has been pitifully absent, replaced by continuous one-upmanship in almost all areas from basketball, swimming, gymnastics, shooting and now even the boat races. It is most noticeably disconcerting during the Olympic Games ceremonial opening parade when officials far outnumber our athletes. Is it any wonder that the Philippine performance continues to be substandard?
Nowhere is utak wang-wang more evident than in the statements of POC Director Jeff Tamayo, who, incredibly, chose to disparage and demean the hard-earned victory of the Dragon Warriors.
“…ang sinalihan nila ay sa beginner’s competition… Kargado na sila from the years of PSC funding tapos hahataw sila sa mga bagong countries na bagong sali. Don’t tell me that’s fair. But I congratulate them for the gold.”
He also said that members of the winning Dragon Boat team should already consider retirement to give way to younger paddlers. “... if you’ve been around for the PH team for the last 12 years or more… Baka naman it’s time to move on. They have the body, they have everything, but as we all know, ampaw na lang ‘yun,” Later he apologized for calling the team “ampaw” or “hollow”, after drawing violent reaction from fans.
In January 2011, POC president Jose “Peping” Cojuangco Jr. formed a committee composed of Manny Lopez, Mark Joseph, and Jeff Tamayo to integrate PDBF with the PCKF. On February 16, Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) was notified of the decision to reorganize the PDBF under the PCKF. In two weeks, on March 4, the Commission wrote a letter to the PDBF asking them to account for the funds, return borrowed equipment, and vacate their offices in the PSC compound.
Why did POC suddenly withdraw its support from a team that showed the most promise of winning in international competitions?
In a word “Politics,” say veteran sports watchers. In 2008 POC President Peping Cojuangco won a tightly-contested re-election that further polarized the national sports associations.
PDBF supported Cojuangco’s rival, former Philippine National Shooting Association president Art Macapagal. Cojuangco denies that politics was involved in decisions regarding the PDBF, but since his re-election, the team has suffered many setbacks.
In 2010, the Dragon Warriors were excluded from the Guangzhou Asian Games. Despite winning gold medals in world championship events, they were made to undergo time trials to qualify. Nonetheless, they were dropped from the Asiad delegation. “The board maintained that the time trial results reflected that our dragonboat teams are not in the best shape for the Asian Games considering the quality of the competition,” said POC chairman Monico Puentevella. But based on their La Mesa Dam qualifying trials on Oct. 11, 2010 the women’s team would have beaten China for gold in the 500- and 250-meter races, and would have secured a silver in the 1,000 meters.
Our national dragon boat teams are regarded as the fastest in the world. The men’s and mixed teams are recordholders in the 200-meter races at the 2009 World Dragon Boat Championships in Prague, Czech Republic. At the 2008 Asian Dragon Boat Championships in Penang, Malaysia, they won gold medals in the women’s 500-meter and the 200-meter mixed premier events. The national women’s team also won all of its events at the First Camarines Sur International Dragon Boat Festival on Oct. 15-17, 2010. They even bested the highly-rated CamSur and Navy’s Fleet Marine teams, two-thirds of whose members were men!
Still they will not be allowed to represent the country in SEAG, Jakarta this November as POC has already finalized the line-up of athletes representing Philippines. PCKF will race for the flag. Sadly, the track records of the two teams are oceans apart. In the 2005 SEAG, Manila, the dragon boat team won all six gold medals in the traditional boat race competition, earning the “NSA of the Year” award from the Philippine Sportswriters Association. In the same Games, the canoe federation garnered one silver and two bronzes. Furthermore, PDBT’s sterling performance came at a more modest annual funding request of about P9.4M versus PCKF’s P48.2M.
But POC decides who can join the Asian Games, and eliminated our winning squads based solely on Jeff Tamayo’s report as chief representative at the time trials. He claimed that “our paddlers were super men and women, or were on super steroids”. He also accused PDBF officials of unethical conduct for giving slow reference times for the 1,000-meter trials. Without getting PDBF’s side, the board adopted Tamayo’s evaluation.
After Puentevella gave the athletes a copy of Tamayo’s report, the PDBF answered point-by-point. To his credit, POC Technical and Rules Committee chairman Go Teng Kok supported the appeal for reconsideration. But the Board refused to review or investigate the report. The dragon boat paddlers only learned of their ouster through media. PDBF never received a formal written communication regarding their exclusion.
The champion Dragon Boat team will not be representing our country in the upcoming SEAG in November 2011 nor in the Asian Games in 2014. “They should follow the rules. All Filipino athletes… if they claim to be athletes, if they claim to be in sports, the very first thing they should do is follow the rules. The doors of the Philippine Canoe-Kayak Federation is open to them, and the POC will assist them in every way,” said Cojuangco. But the families and supporters of the team worry that the paddlers may become victims of politics because the chef de mission of the SEAG delegation is the president of the canoe-kayak federation.
The country will count the medals won by the POC’s anointed ones. For their sake, they better prove that they were chosen based on performance, not politics.
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