They refused to meet face to face

Historians tell us that the sporting event presently called Olympic Games started sometime in 776 B.C. in ancient Greece. It was in 1894 though that Pierre de Coubertin launched the plan to revive the Olympiad and the first Olympic Games of modern era were played in Athens, Greece in 1896. According to the Internet, the “exact reasons for the birth of the games (were and) are still unknown, as history has become mixed up with mythology.”

The Philippines first participated in the Olympics, about a hundred years ago and coincidentally, it was in the 1924 Paris Olympics when our first Olympian, David Nepomuceno, a sprinter from Albay, competed in the 100-meter dash and the 200-meter run.

I like to believe that our national games, termed in Tagalog as Palarong Pambansa, as an event, is patterned from the Olympics model. The Palaro was opened the other day with Cebu City as the host of most competitions and the cities of Lapu-Lapu, Mandaue and Talisay being the other venues.

President Ferdinand R Marcos Jr., no less, came here for the formal start of the events. His presence here in Cebu City indicated the importance of the national games even if his attendance of the Formula One in Singapore (which was not publicized for obvious security reasons) showed his preference for high profile sports. Don’t get me wrong. When I mentioned the president’s watching the Formula One race in a foreign country, he was just a very interested spectator. In contrast, when President Marcos, Jr., spoke to the delegations the other day, he sounded melodramatic words as the annual national games being an “important legacy that celebrates unity and camaraderie.”

I have quoted the president’s florid attribution of import of the Palaro because politics has come to play. I feel that the glaring difference in the brewing political confrontation of the country’s highest officials seems to far outweigh the importance of such identified national events as our country’s kind of Olympics. It was reported that Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio wasalsoin Cebu City. She reportedly came to be a part of the opening rites. We expected that the president and the vice president would share the stage to demonstrate unity and camaraderie. There would have a thunderous applause from the thousands of people in attendance had Marcos Jr and Duterte-Carpio been seen in a beso-beso style of social greetings.

The president and the vice president did not meet face to face. In their unwillingness to be seen civil to each other in the same forum, they both publicized their mutual dislike. Both of them opted to be elsewhere. A friendly rumor monger told me that Marcos Jr spent time in Compostela town, on a round trip travel time of a fast one hour, to avoid the chance of meeting the vice president at the Abella grounds. Duterte-Carpio, on her part, did not grace the inauguration but instead went to the Basilica del Sto Nino. It was a good act of devotion Cebuanos, mostly Catholics, admire. She was also at the Cebu City Medical Center not to check why the project has not been completed but to visit ailing delegates a dyed-in-the-wool political gimmickry.

The presidential and vice presidential non-meeting was not a work of chance. Nobody is willing to admit it, but I think it must be a product of careful planning by people who believed that such a non-encounter was important to their own agenda. How history will be written on this matter might be akin to mythology that world historians cite as beclouding the reason of the organization of Olympics.