Men in the mirror

There will be hell to pay, according to the Monday morning quarterbacking that usually follows what is described as a quadrennial exercise in futility. Questions have been asked and doubts raised in the aftermath of still another misadventure in the Olympics. Why did we field an “unqualified” runner who would only finish last in his race? Why did we allow our swimmers to virtually drown in the wake of the likes of Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte? And why did we send into combat—at great expense—a Filipino-Japanese judoka whose performance would last only 65 seconds?

But those asking these questions, according to the 11 Filipino athletes who flew to London for the 30th Olympic Games, are completely missing the point of the Olympiad, which brings together the youth of the world in a gathering that is both competitive and unifying. They insist, and rightly so, that the Olympics is not about winning medals, and point out that only a few of the 10,500 participating athletes get to stand on the podium. They had worked hard to qualify, putting their lives on hold and sacrificing time, effort, family and even their studies for the right to be called Olympians. They were the best of the Filipino athletes, and in London, they did their best.

Let’s not blame the athletes then. They’re the victims here.

Still, Olympic performance is a reflection of the state of sports development and a matter of national pride in each country. The Philippines, alas, fell off the medal table after light flyweight boxer Mansueto “Onyok” Velasco came home with silver from Atlanta in 1996. It has since been a losing streak; Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London have all been disasters.

Once again, what ails Philippine sports?

The malaise goes all the way up to the national leadership and its failure to grasp the concept of sports and physical fitness as a tool for nation building. When we kicked out the dictator in 1986, the new dispensation also killed the goose that laid the golden eggs in sports. Project: Gintong Alay, the highly successful sports program that spawned the likes of Lydia de Vega and Isidro del Prado in less than a year, was abandoned, mainly because it was the brainchild of Ferdinand Marcos’ nephew. In its place, the new Congress legislated the Philippine Sports Commission, which eventually became a tool of presidential appointees, politicians and their surrogates. The PSC took over the functions of Gintong Alay and those of the education department for both the elite program and the grassroots, school-based program. But somewhere along the way, it was ambushed by politicians.

The Philippine Olympic Committee has not been of much help either, with its leaders becoming embroiled in power plays with what were supposed to be autonomous national sports associations (NSAs). Its hand showed in the leadership struggles in basketball, badminton, cycling, billiards and equestrian.

To compound things, the government reduced funding for sports by half, or an estimated P700 million a year. Sports leaders clamored for the restoration of that budget, even threatening to hale the national government to the Supreme Court. But those out of the loop warned that money in the hands of the corrupt and incompetent was money wasted.

What to do to turn things around? The national leadership needs to find the resolve to draw up a coherent and properly funded national sports development program, covering both the grassroots and the elite sectors, to be run by credible and competent leaders and complemented by privately financed corporate programs on mass sports to cover the rest of society. The idea is to make sports both a way of life and a state of mind.

Politicians masquerading as sports leaders and sports leaders behaving like politicians have long held Philippine sports hostage, using the athletes and the NSAs as pawns in their play for power. The debacle in London is an indictment, not so much of the performance of our athletes as of the quality of their leaders. It’s time for the corrupt, the incompetent and the power-hungry to go.

As the athletes and their coaches returned from London early last week and picked up from where they had left off in their lives, sports leaders again vowed to go “back to the drawing boards” to grapple with the nagging question: Where did we go wrong?

They only have to look in the mirror to find the answer.