The saga of Mary Joy Tabal has reached an acceptable conclusion, and one of two final hurdles to the Cebuana’s bid to join the Rio Olympics has been removed. The Philippine Amateur Track and Field Association (Patafa) has reinstated Tabal in the national team, paving the way for her to get the necessary approval to take part in the summer games.
Patafa’s decision on Tabal’s reinstatement was both Solomonic and inevitable. It is but fair that Patafa reevaluate Tabal’s reinstatement after the Olympics; after all, the marathoner has had her share of transgressions at which her mother association needs to take a closer look. She disobeyed Patafa leadership and burned bridges when she decided to design her own running program.
But the decision was also inevitable because Patafa had nowhere else to go in this controversy. Barring Tabal from the national squad and therefore disqualifying her from joining the Olympics would have sent the association’s name resonating negatively through time. However legitimate it thinks its reasons were, Patafa would have been judged harshly by history as a dream killer if it held hard on punishing Tabal for her faults by junking her Olympic aspirations.
There is no good that can come out of beating a dead horse, as it were, but neither can harm come from slicing open the carcass for an autopsy that would help future sports leaders understand how things nearly came apart in the Tabal saga.
Tabal qualified for the Olympics by meeting the standard set for female marathoners in a race held in Canada. But at the time she crossed the finish line, she had been out of Patafa for a while: She had broken ties with it over differences in training methods.
Like many Filipino athletes, Tabal is not well off, thus needing to participate in as many races as she can to augment her athlete’s allowance. Patafa had wanted to limit her running. After spotting her potential, Patafa wanted to space her events to prevent her body from breaking down. Marathon, after all, is a brutal, exacting sport. When both sides failed to see eye to eye, Tabal resigned from the national team.
She went at it on her own, collecting sponsors who helped fund her training and her international stints and opting for a coach with whom she was more comfortable. She joined local and foreign races, much to Patafa’s chagrin.
The conflict hardly merited attention until Tabal met the qualifying time for the Olympics. While the Philippines celebrated another qualifier, Patafa doused everyone’s expectations by saying Tabal wasn’t a member of the national pool and that she had to meet several demands of the association for her to be reinstated and gain the much needed endorsement that would take her to Rio.
The standoff benefited no one. Tabal was pictured as an obstinate rebel who literally hit the highway when she couldn’t get her way. Patafa, meanwhile, was being criticized for being an unforgiving authoritarian willing to keep an athlete from her dream in the name of disciplinary action. But to argue that turning a blind eye to Tabal’s transgressions would be unfair to other athletes who stuck by Patafa’s training canons is to oversimplify the controversy. It would be like countering that argument with the fact that the Olympic motto is “faster, higher, stronger,” and not “more obedient.”
The issue is that until we have a hundred qualifiers competing for Olympic spots, sports associations should focus on removing roadblocks when it comes to Olympic participation. Sports officials should create a climate of inclusion. It is not every day, after all, that we have athletes booking tickets to the quadrennial meet, the summit that every national athlete strives to reach. And Tabal’s faults were all administrative in nature. She wasn’t caught doping or going off route and taking a shortcut to meet the qualifying time. The weight of making the cutoff for an Olympic slot should always be priority consideration.
Patafa’s work is not yet done when it comes to Tabal. There is still the problem of both sides having different sponsors to deal with. But that is a minor issue that the Patafa leadership can easily iron out. After all, the association chief, Philip Ella Juico, when he led the Philippine Sports Commission, was a proponent of private sponsorship for athletes.
After that, Patafa has to lobby hard so that the international athletics federation sanctions Tabal’s race as an Olympic qualifier, thereby cementing the young lady’s dream stint in the Rio Olympics.