Marcial, Bernardino bag golds

Former champions Rachel Marcial and Jurie Bernardino took different routes but produced the same results as they beat their respective rivals to bag the gold medals in the seniors division of the Samsung Best of the Best National Taekwondo Championships at the Glorietta Activity Center in Makati yesterday.

The 24-year-old Marcial, coming off a bronze medal feat in the recent Korea Open, pulled off a tough 5-3 victory over La Salle’s Gerrielyn Aranzanso to rule the finweight class of the seniors’ women’s division and duplicate her feat in the 2001 edition of this annual event sponsored by Samsung.

Bernardino, winner of the gold medal in the featherweight class as a junior in 2004, dominated fellow UST jin Vincent Rey David in their three-round final encounter and coasted to a 6-2 win for the gold medal, also in the finweight class of the seniors men’s category.

Joining Marcial and Bernardino, both bidding for slots in the national team competing in the Asian Games in Doha in December, in the winners‘ podium were Carlos Padilla of NTU Tigers and Monica Dianelo of Angeles University.

Padilla, one of the members of the national pool seeing action in this five-day event supported by Burlington, Kix, Peak, The Ayala Center, The Philippine Star and Sunbolt, rapped Rommel Jordan of FEU, 5-1, to capture the flyweight crown while Dianelo proved too tough for Larize Romero of Nueva Ecija as she posted a 6-0 rout to win the flyweight gold.

Still disputing the gold medals at presstime are Loreto Velasquez of San Beda and Jan Hernandez of FEU in the men’s featherweight, and Esther Marie Singson of UST and Sabrina Simbulan of UP in the women’s bantamweight class.

Meanwhile, action in the juniors division begins today with those in the 14-17 age bracket strutting their wares in the event that lured participants from the provinces, specifically the Visayas and Mindanao regions who were gold medal winners in international, national and regional competitions.

Rommel Roa of San Beda, on the other hand, came out a 1-0 winner over FEU’s Jhundreb Allas to cop the gold medal in the bantamweight division

The grade schoolers (13-and-below) take center stage on Saturday along with the team standard poomsae and taekwon chejo events, which offer a total prize pot of P75,000.

Poomsae showcases the forms and standard stance in taekwondo while taekwon chejo features taekwondo movements incorporated with aerobics, dance or gymnastics.