Knott in great position

The past week has been filled with great accomplishments by Filipina athletes. Even non-golfers now know about Yuka Saso becoming the country’s first-ever US major golf champion, male or female. The teenager overcame a scary final round to etch her name into the US Open history books. This was closely followed by the announcement by World Skate that Margielyn Didal will be going to the Tokyo Olympics. Though she did not qualify outright at the 2021 World Street Skateboarding Championships in Rome, her performance was enough to catapult her to 13th overall, enough for a spot in the Games. But there are still other Filipina athletes closing in on Tokyo, as well.

Two-time Southeast Asian Games gold medalist sprinter Kristina Knott is confident that she will earn a berth in the Olympics, as well. Throughout the year that gyms were closed in Florida, the defending SEA Games 200-meter dash champion was confined to training on grass at a park near her home in Florida. But now that she’s tasted competition again – earning silvers in a meet in Italy, she knows her time has come.

“It’s there,” Knott says. “It’s just a question of when. I’ve been competing practically every week. It’s a matter of being patient. It’s all mental now.”

Kristina turned heads when she beat the 200-meter record set by Lydia de Vega in the late 1980’s, a record that stood since before Knott was born. It was special for her because it happened in front of a home crowd in the Philippines. But her lesser-known second record is probably even more special, because it happened during the pandemic. In August of 2020, the Fil-American eclipsed the Asian sprint queen’s record in the 100-meter dash by a hundredth of a second, clocking an amazing 11.27 seconds. De Vega had previously set the mark of 11.28 back in the 1987 Southeast Asian Games.

“Going into that meet, I wasn’t really expecting anything because I had been training on grass,” Knott admits. “What made it special is that it happened in the middle of the pandemic.”

Now that all gyms and other training facilities are fully operational in Florida, Kristina has been training while awaiting the final run of Olympic qualifiers. If Knott makes it to Tokyo, she will be the 11th Filipino athlete to qualify, joining Didal, EJ Obiena, Carlos Yulo, Irish Magno, Eumir Marcial, Nesthy Petecio, Carlo Paalam, Hidilyn Diaz, Cris Nievarez and Kurt Barbosa in what appears to be the most formidable and most varied Philippine Olympic contingent ever.