Cebu's twin sports records

This week, Cebu City will officially set at least one new world record in one of the world’s oldest sports. The best part of it is it involves reviving love for a sport that involves strategy and patience in children, which a phenom named Bobby Fischer made popular in the early 1970’s.

On Jan. 21 and 22, over 4,000 participants, mainly grade school and secondary students will play in the finals of the Cebu Chess Festival: World’s Largest Chess Tournament. “It’s a transformational experience for the ordinary barangay kids who only need a chess board and the shade of a mango tree.”

Ed Hayco was previously responsible for Cebu City’s Guinness World Record for the world’s largest dance class of 7,770 dancers at the same venue four years ago. They actually had 10,000 dancers prepared, but decided that only the best would perform as a matter of integrity. Hayco and his wife, Eleanor, founded Team Cebu City Dancesport roughly a decade ago, and have a long-standing grassroots program that spans the entire province.

Today, Cebu City’s dancesport team has truly changed the course of the sport. Their policy of cascading down training has led to the spread of the sport to thousands upon thousands of youth. Kids as young as six years old train older children in their outreach program. The city sponsors a team to competitions all over the United States, where they continually rake in hundreds of medals each year.

For this project, eliminations began in October. Previously, the city sports commission had been giving free chess lessons as part of its summer program to give free training in various sports to the youth. To their surprise, participation kept growing, and never stopped.

“We first targeted only 1,500 participants,” said Hayco.  “We didn’t realize the number would balloon to more than 50,000 after we launched an aggressive grassroots program that took three months of workshops in over 150 public schools.”

Officially, the Guinness World Record was set in Krasnoyarsk, Russia with 1,214 participants. In several of their eliminations alone, Cebu already pulverized the existing record. Apas National High School had 1,594 registered participants; Barrio Luz Elementary School had 1,369 players; Don Carlos Gothong Memorial Night High School tallied 2,289. Abellana National School alone topped them all with 3,432 registered participants.

The other milestones Cebu City marked this week was the 80th anniversary of the Cacoy Doce Pares World Federation, probably the oldest arnis, kali and escrima training center in the Philippines. The training center itself was established on Jan. 11, 1932. Supreme Grandmaster Ciriaco “Cacoy” Cañete founded it with his 11 older brothers (hence “doce pares” in reference to 12 pairs of fighting sticks) and now in his 90’s, still continues to teach and travel for seminars. 

Doce Pares (docepares.com) has member clubs and schools in at least 17 countries from the US to Europe to Southeast Asia. Cañete’s creation eskrido (combining escrima and judo) is taught in most of them. Each year, Doce Pares has a world championship among its member countries and hands out awards to outstanding masters and clubs. Cañete’s books on technique have been sold around the world.

And he doesn’t look like he’s about to slow down.

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As a follow-up to our last piece on tennis instructor AJ de Leon, as a result of his passing the Level 3 ITF coaching certification in Spain, he is now in India coaching a selection of boys 16 and under in three ITF events until Jan. 28. Upon his return to the Philippines, he and his father-in-law, ITF official Ajay Pathak, will scout for underprivileged children to train in the sport at their base of operations in Subic Bay.