LONDON – Marestella Torres admitted yesterday she was depressed over failing to advance to the finals in the women’s long jump at the 30th Olympics here and will decide whether or not to seek a ticket to the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro after the Asian Games in Incheon in 2014.
“I’m tired of this,” she said, shrugging her shoulders before leaving for home the other day. “I’m very depressed with my showing. I had high expectations. In preparing for London, my distance was very good. I thought I would peak by August in time for the Olympics. Honestly, I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it. I was nowhere near my personal best of 6.71 meters.”
The 31-year-old San Jose, Negros Oriental, jumper was one of only three Asians in the cast of 16 seeking to qualify for the finals. The others were Bahrain’s Bianca Stuart and Uzbekistan’s Yuliya Tarasova. Torres’ personal best was only higher than Georgia’s Maiko Gogoladze whose mark was 6.65.
Torres’ three jumps produced distances of 5.98, 6.21 and 6.32. If she only duplicated her personal best or even her season’s best of 6.62, Torres would’ve barged into the finals where the lowest qualifier was Serbia’s Ivana Spanovic with a distance of 6.41.
“I came prepared,” she said. “Maybe, I didn’t get enough rest from training. I got back from a competition in Kazakhstan, hardly slept that night then went straight to the airport for the flight to London. In warming up for the event, I didn’t feel any kind of muscle pain. What I felt was the chill. The temperature went down to 17 degrees Celsius with rain and wind. I couldn’t warm up in the usual area because of the cold so I did my stretching in the weights room. I don’t know if the cold penetrated my muscles. I just couldn’t jump the way I usually do. What made it more difficult was we were 16 jumpers rotating so the wait was long for your next turn. I got chilly waiting. I don’t know if the mental factor contributed to my performance.”
Torres said she was out to improve on her personal best. “This was my second Olympics, my second chance,” said the four-time Southeast Asian Games gold medalist. “From May to July, I jumped very well with results better than in London. After my first jump, I knew there was a problem. I tried to force myself to jump longer but I felt my body getting weaker. I never jumped so poorly in an international competition and it had to be in the Olympics. The qualifying for the final was only 6.4 – I’m used to jumping longer than that.”
Torres said she hopes there will be a new order in training athletes in the future. “My coach Joseph Sy accompanied me to London,” she said. “But you know how it is in a National Sports Association with limited funding. A coach supervises several athletes, it’s never a one-on-one. I don’t really have a personal coach to watch over me. We call it ‘sariling kayod.’ But I learn from failures. I apply things I observe during competitions to my training. Some have been effective, some not. The key is to train abroad and get a coach who can devote full-time to developing an athlete.”
At the moment, Torres is looking beyond the Southeast Asian Games in Myanmar next year. She has set her sights on the Asian Games in 2014. “I had a bad experience in the last Asian Games and I want to make up for it,” she said. “In the last Asian Games, I went 6.49 in my first jump but I was called for a foul in the next five rounds from the second to sixth.”