Carlos Yulo and the height of sports

In the aftermath of Carlos Yulo’s historic and breathtaking double victory in gymnastics, many were quick to point out that his height—4’11—was almost the same as that of Hidilyn Diaz, and that it was no barrier for either of them to achieve incredible sporting success at the most rarefied of global stages. The corollary—aired by some and implied by others—is that maybe we should rethink our focus on sports where tallness confers an advantage, most especially basketball, our so-called national sport.

As a medical anthropologist, I happen to have been studying the meanings of height in our society, so I am following this discourse with keen interest. For my Ph.D., I did an “ethnography of human stature” in Puerto Princesa, following the different situations in which height matters, from beauty pageants to basketball games. My overall finding, which I present in my book “Height Matters” (University of the Philippines Press, 2023), is that height is a form of “body capital” for young people, giving the social and economic opportunities, like working as a security guard or a flight attendant—or being given an athletic scholarship in a Metro Manila university. “My life would have been very different if I were a few inches shorter,” as one of the beauty queens told me.

What’s even more fascinating with height is that it has a multifaceted, biosocial history: The heights of entire populations have actually changed over time. For instance, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world today with an average height of six feet for males and 5-foot-7 for females, but in the 18th century the average Dutch soldier was only 5-foot-4. European chroniclers in the 16th and 17th century never generalized the peoples of our islands as short: They were likely of a similar height themselves. Only in the late 19th century, and especially during the American period, that colonial officials like William Howard Taft and Dean Worcester used height as a marker of difference, patronizingly calling us “little brown brothers.”

Not coincidentally, that was also the time when the institutions of modern sports—including the Olympics—began to be commercialized and globalized; the recently invented team sports valued tallness. Even basketball’s inventor James Naismith, watching the basketball games at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, said that “Filipinos would have won if not for their height.”

The notion that Filipinos are handicapped because of our height continues to dominate the discourse today, but the very idea that “Filipinos are short” is not rooted in history or biology. Like the Dutch, our Asian neighbors have gotten taller over the years due to better quality of life and nutrition, and so have (more) affluent Filipinos, which is why the kids in elite private schools are much taller than their public school counterparts even as stunting remains very high in our country. Of course, there are exceptions to this general observation; height’s uncertainty makes it seem even more of a “natural” phenomenon, but it is socioeconomically as much as it is genetically determined.

Thus, height is not a physical barrier to success in basketball and other sports. In fact, we just won basketball in last year’s Asian Games, reclaiming the title after 61 years. What’s problematic, perhaps, is not just how basketball has not only dominated funding support, but it has also monopolized most of our tall athletes, when they could have also used their heights as an advantage in other sports. For instance, EJ Obiena, who stands at 6-foot-2, put up a great performance in pole vaulting and I continue to believe in his future success.

For these reasons, then—and not because “we are short”—we should be supporting a diversity of sporting fields, alongside (and not at the expense of) basketball. The Olympic Games has always been a site of privilege for certain physical attributes, from the long wingspan of American swimmer Michael Phelps to the sheer strength of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif; thankfully, the plethora of events means that there are opportunities for various body types. This is especially true for sports that actually have divisions to accommodate this corporeal diversity, such as boxing with its various weight classes that allowed our athletes—from Anthony Villanueva and Onyok Velasco to Nesthy Petecio, Carlo Paalam, Eumir Marcial, and Aira Villegas—to shine. Curiously, there were early proposals to limit the heights of basketball players to 6-foot-3 and even to create different “height categories” in earlier Olympiads, but they were fiercely opposed by the United States.

On a final note, the suggestion that a diversification of sports will challenge stereotypes about people of different statures—alongside gender and race stereotypes—is also a very welcome incentive, especially in a country where heightism and height discrimination are realities. If Yulo and Diaz can reach the top of their sporting fields regardless of their height, we should rethink its being seen as a measure of physical or social status—or a requirement for far easier tasks than winning an Olympic medal.

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glasco@inquirer.com.ph