The gold medal of all gold medals
THE Philippine media should hide its face in shame with the way it has been covering — or, more correctly, not covering — the performances of athletes from other countries in the 30th Southeast Asian Games, which we are hosting.
It’s a guessing game, for example, on who almost swept the swimming events for men and women held in New Clark City in Tarlac.
It’s perennial powerhouse Singapore, the almost undisputed king of Southeast Asian aquatics for several decades now with token resistance from Thailand and, lately, Vietnam, and yet local reporters and their editors gave Filipino swimmers, including those who landed second, fourth, sixth in their respective events, the generous and “patriotic” treatment that they deserved but made at the expense of non-Filipino winners.
Didn’t they know that Joseph Schooling, the Singaporean breaststroker who beat the mighty Michael Phelps in the Rio Olympics in 2016 for the city-state’s first-ever gold medal in the quadrennial conclave was here for the 2019 edition of Southeast Asia’s premier sports championships?
For the record, Phelps is the only swimmer in the world who owns eight gold medals, the number he pocketed in one Olympic Games ( Beijing in 2008).
Of, course, Schooling lost a race but came back strongly to defend his 100 backstroke crown.
If that is not news, then we don’t know what is.
Or, for another example, which of the 11 countries participating in this year’s SEA Games topped the archery competition?
This corner itself will have to Google the winner, because it already knows that a Filipino husbandand- wife team emerged as surprise winners in a mixed event of the sport, the only champions from here who, no doubt, also deserved the column inches devoted to them.
Or again, for still another sin of omission, which country grabbed the other gold medals in men and women’s fencing more than the three bagged by the Philippines?
Ewan ngmga readers or listeners, kasi the Philippines did not sweep its rivals in the discipline as it had boasted.
There were 12 gold medals for the taking in the three categories each in men and women’s fencing: (individual epee, plus the team title; individual foil, plus the team crown; and individual saber, plus the team championship).
So, will the Philippine media’s bright boys and girls account for the nine “missing” gold medals, so the people may know who “stole” them?
In athletics or track and field where, okay, the Philippines had conceded before the start of the SEA Games that it would have to work doubly hard to upstage crack Thai sprinters and Vietnamese middle distance runners, nobody knows the winners of track or field events in which no Filipino competitor stood a Chinaman’s chance for a podium finish.
Massaging results of the Games is not a good practice, which is to say it is a bad one, and to engage in it unintentionally is an unintentional means to feed the super egos of people who-- at this writing and a day before the formal closing of the supposedly highly successful staging of the 30th edition-- seemed ready to grab credit from the Philippine Olympic Committee over such success.
Well, with a reported budget of P7.5 billion, these people had better deliver, or face the wrath of Filipinos, fan or no.
Drum roll, please, this column would like to award the Philippine media the gold medal in UnderReporting/ Non- Reporting of the Sterling Showing of the Philippines’ Rivals and the Over- Reporting of Feats of Filipino Athletes event.
We are adding to the haul of the country, through the Philippine media, the Gloating in Your Face silver medal for the posturing in print how we socked it to them, including Laos and Timor-Leste.
A bronze medal we are also handing over to the Philippine media for its sin of omission for hardly mentioning, or not at all, that poor, poor Timor-Leste won a bronze medal in men’s boxing, the first medal of any color won by the former Portuguese colony since it began taking part in the Games.
Wait until Dili hosts the Southeast Asian Games in the future when, we are sure, it would figure in the medal race by padding the calendar with obscure events the way previous and the current hosts did to make a mockery of what constitutes sports and what passes for parlor games.
Newspaper dance, anyone?