Olympic gold can make you a millionaire but...

YOU win a gold medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics and you also pocket P10 million, courtesy of President Aquino. Incentive it is called. Well, the money does not really come from P-Noy. P-Noy had merely signed last week the expanded version of Republic Act 9064, amending the Sports Bonus Act of 2001 passed by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The law offers cash windfalls to medal-winning athletes not only in the Olympiad but also in the other events like the Asiad and the SEA Games.

If you fail and you settle for an Olympic silver, you still win P5 million. With a bronze, you pocket P2 million.

In other words, any of the three Olympic medals you nail in Rio, you end up being an instant millionaire. Who needs lotto?

But then, will that happen? I mean, can any one of those Olympic medals within piercing distance?

Alas, they are absolutely achievable but not certainly that acquirable easily?

Historically, it is only in boxing that we’ve had chances of winning an Olympic medal.

It is both in the Asiad and SEA Games that we traditionally have the biggest chances of scooping up the medals.

In the amended Act, an Asiad gold is worth P2 million, silver P1 million and bronze P400,000. For SEA Games medalists, a gold is P300,000, silver P150,000 and bronze P60,000. But to get back to Olympic eureka. After we won our last Olympic medal in 1996 through boxer Onyok Velasco’s silver, we went zero in the next four Olympiads in Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012.

We were in the thick of things in Sydney 2000 for a boxing bronze until our strongest bet got sideswiped by spotty officiating—the refereeing being always the bane of our pugilists in many Olympiads past.

I covered Sydney 2000 and I still vividly remember what Mel Lopez, the former Manila mayor and the country’s boxing chief then, said to me after that controversy-laden boxing verdict: “Again, we didn’t have enough money to make things happen for our boxer.”

Rio 2016 is just months away and our boxers are still laboring in harsh qualifying events worldwide to gain Olympic slots in Brazil in August.

Sure, the new incentives are great. It’s the competition, stupid. And boxing officiating, idiot.