Quinones gold augurs well for RP cycling

HANOI — The gold medal Navyman Eusebio Quinones clinched in mountain bike in the Southeast Asian Games kicks off a new era in Philippine cycling.

"It’s definitely the signal of a new era of Philippine cycling, or putting it modestly, it’s putting cycling back to where it used to be," said Mar Mendoza, secretary-general of the national association for cycling who also was team manager of the Filipino riders who came home Sunday with Quinones’ cross-country gold medal, Victor Espiritu and Warren Davadilla’s silvers in ITT and road race and Baby Marites Bitbit and Alfie Catalan’s bronze in women’s cross-country and criterium.

PhilCycling president Bert Lina, ecstatic over the gold medal which came just two months after he and his administration at the cycling federation officially took over, has immediately buckled down to setting the tone for making the Philippines the king of Sea Games cycling.

"This campaign has allowed us to take a peek as to how our cyclists fare against our neighbors and what we should do with our own programs back home," said Lina, who has prepared an appropriate welcome ceremony for the cycling team.

Lina will also provide cash incentives to the entire cycling team and especially to the medal winners as he praised the successful campaign as a team effort. "It was a team effort," he said.

The team, coached by Jomel Lorenzo and Domingo Villanueva with Dante Valdez as team support in the road races and Oscar Rodriguez and Renato Mier in mountain bike, was able to surpass the performances of the country in the past three Sea Games. The gold this year was the first won on the road since Joselito Santos topped the velodrome 1-km time trial in Chiang Mai in 1995. A gold was also won by Espiritu in ITT in 1997 in Jakarta after Indonesian Tonton Susanto was stripped of the title for failing the dope test.

Lina said he is looking forward to a stronger finish in 2005, when the Philippines host the games. He is focused at helping refurbish the Amoranto Velodrome, which was built for the 1981 games and utilized anew in 1991, the first two instances that the Philippines played host to the biennial games.

"There is a lot of homework to do to bring cycling to the top," said Lina. "But for the meantime, let us savor this year’s performance, which has already surpassed what we have done in the recent games."