Sporting chances

“All the ills plaguing our sports realm are surmountable if only we all put our heads and hearts into it.

Their athletic victories justly call for wild celebrations in more ways than one.

It is not every day we get the much needed shot in the arm this early of having two certified world-class athletes, unfamiliar faces in the sporting realm but who are now bound for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

It is not every day such athletic feats effectively stop the rigor mortis of our sports realm, where many an athlete’s face sport the dirty color of sickness of proverbial poverty, hope all gone while awaiting oblivion.

So, we need to overwhelmingly hail them, our snappy salutes at ready as they step on the winners’ podium, cheering their new-found fame for making good in unheralded sports hereabouts.

More so since it is not also every day where one of them makes sports history as the only Filipino to capture the country’s first ever gold medal in the 49th Artistic Gymnastics World Championships.

No mean feat considering artistic gymnastics is the most common gymnastics discipline and a very popular Olympics sport, attracting hordes of top caliber competitors from all over the world.

By now, the story of 19-year-old Manila-born gymnast Carlos Edriel “Caloy” Yulo’s is a twice-told tale of incidental circumstance and grit.

His story is also great stuff for constructing a new home-grown and mythical sporting tradition in gymnastics where, as news report thundered, it “is virtually alien to a country that considers basketball as a religion.”

Important, since experienced sports watchers consider a home-grown sporting tradition is a vital prerequisite for any unheralded sport to gain the public’s undivided attention. Recall here the near mythical magic of Efren “Bata” Reyes in billiards or of Eugene Torre in chess or even of Robert Jaworski’s “never say die” arrogance in basketball.

As it is, Yulo came out of the grimy bowels of Malate, Manila, where as a kid he probably was doing cartwheels with other grimy kids in a grimy children’s park just off exhausted Manila Zoo.

A fortunate jaunt one day to the nearby Rizal Memorial Coliseum imagined a gymnastic future, after he became enthralled by national gymnasts in training, his mother recalls.

By the time he was seven years old, the son of a messenger with street dancing skills started training as a gymnast, sticking to his sport all the way to high school at Adamson U, on the support of the national gymnastics association.

By 2013, Yulo was in Japan, convinced by his Japanese coach Munehiro Kugemiya he can be better at his sport. In the next six years, Kugimiya nurtured and mentored the Teikyo University student taking up literature into a world-class athlete. Sporadic outings in international gymnastic meets gained him notice but not much anything else.

Then there was last week’s historic feat at Stuttgart, Germany, where the 4’ 11” dynamo topped the men’s floor exercise final with a score of 15.300, and this shortly after he gained an Olympics berth. After his feat, Yulo and his coach went to visit a museum.

His feat in Germany, a local sports watcher of mine contentedly honked, restored “faith” in our country’s Olympic hopes and hopefully will end “decades of frustration” when the world’s biggest quadrennial sporting event rolls around in the summer of next year.

But Yulo is not alone in rekindling our hopes of finally bagging home the elusive Olympic gold.

Pole vaulter Ernest John Obiena, weightlifter, and Olympics silver medalist Hidilyn Diaz and Nesthy Petecio in women’s boxing are also up there, hoping they do good as we spectators, out here in the cheap stands of the stadium, are fervently hoping, too.

Of Obiena, he is officially the first Filipino to qualify for the Tokyo summer games when he cleared 5.81 meters in the Men’s Pole Vault competition of Salto Con L’asta in Piazza Chiari, against all odds. Obiena secured his maiden Olympics berth blissfully unaware he was actually the first Filipino to qualify.

Although the six-footer Obiena, son of former pole vault great Emerson Obiena, came short of breaking the 5.90-meter Asian record, he nonetheless surpassed the Philippine record of 5.76 meters he himself had set last July.

Obiena, Diaz, Petecio and Yulo are all predicted to finish with handsome gold-medal victories in the forthcoming Southeast Asian Games in December. More celebrations ahead then.

Truly, there is much to celebrate. Yet the celebratory air, as always with anything that’s good, is ringed with hypocrisies and sadness.

Hypocrisies because amid laudatory congratulations are the unfounded claims of sports officialdom they have done well. Laughable claims in face of a public knowing all too well these people’s idea of sports development often seem suspiciously has to do with what they can corrupt from government and private funds earmarked for sports.

Sadness because we, in many a conversation about sports, still go through with the ritual of acknowledging the same tired, exhausted reasons establishing what’s wrong with our sports.

We still lament with the same litanies sports watcher Paolo Monteiro summed up long ago — lack of sufficient funding, the need to widen the base of athletic talent, failing to create strong local traditions of all sports, and the dire lack of a strong and clear sports policy implemented by competent officials.

A detailed examination of these ills and its solutions is out of bounds for my short space here. Suffice it to say, however, that all the ills plaguing our sports realm are surmountable if only we all put our heads and hearts into it.

And if only we realize too that all sports, other than basketball, bring us the same unity our country’s badly needs.

As is often said, sports are beyond politics, religion and what else besides. Sports are still about human excellence. It is not even a matter that it is only for rich countries and big men.

Diminutive nations and men and women will achieve wonders, given the chance. Carlos Edriel “Caloy” Yulo, a Filipino, just proved that.