15th Asian Games

HOW’S THIS FOR A COMMENTARY ON OUR times? When our gold medalists in the recently concluded Asian Games returned home, no one from the government was at the airport to meet them. The presidential palace issued a press statement, however, saying the medalists and their fellow athletes would be feted in Malacañang sometime soon.

The contrast would not have been as stark if the latest triumphant homecoming of boxing icon Manny Pacquiao had not been so recent—or so ecstatic. Make no mistake; the world’s best boxer, pound for pound, deserves his moment in history’s sun (even if politicians have been transparent in their attempt to bask in the reflected sunlight).

But the country’s delegates to the Asiad in Doha, Qatar—especially the four gold medalists Antonio Gabica (9-ball), Violito Payla (flyweight), Joan Tipon (bantamweight) and Rene Catalan (wushu)—deserve a warm welcome too. The least the national government could have done was to send a high public official to represent the people in homecoming rites at the airport.

Perhaps the Arroyo administration was too busy rationalizing its surrender on the issue of fast-tracked Charter change. Or perhaps the officials who are in charge of these things thought there was very little upside to the homecoming idea. Perhaps, they thought, the paucity of winners would draw attention to the medals that the country did not win.

That, however, is exactly why the government should have gone out of its way to welcome the medalists home. The first and overriding lesson of all sports competitions is that each athlete is the story; win or lose, it is the athlete who competes, with others as well as with himself. If he (or in many wonderful instances, she) does well, that is in itself a feat worth celebrating.

That our lean delegation to the Asiad won four gold medals, six silvers and nine bronzes—despite the odds, despite the glitches, despite the sorry circumstance that some of our best boxers had to share the same pair of boxing shorts—is a considerable achievement. Each of our winners, and even those who just missed stepping into the winner’s circle, reminded us why we join such sports spectaculars in the first place: each competition is a potential showcase of the human spirit.

Come to think of it, the official indifference was a weird echo of possibly the most famous anecdote out of the country’s participation in this year’s Asiad: The story about one wealthy sports patron offering his expensive Rolex watch as a prize to the first Filipino to win a gold medal in athletics, during the barren first several days of the Games. It made for an interesting anecdote, the exact sort of thing that gets passed around the dinner table. But it needs to be said: The offer was a misguided one.

When a national-caliber athlete is already at an international competition, the motivation for excelling becomes simpler—we can even say purer. It is the sheer opportunity to do one’s best. In a highly competitive environment like the Asiad, it is the athlete’s vocation to compete well.

The role of the coach, or the delegation official, or the sponsor is to prepare the athlete for what is accurately called the moment of truth.

Money or riches are no longer a motivation. The time to offer financial rewards is years before the event, when the athlete must create his own discipline and source his own motivations for the boring drills, the inevitable lonely hours. When Tipon said he wanted to use the P1.5 million in incentives due him from the national sports program to build his own house, we are moved by yet another stirring example of years of discipline and persistence finally, and literally, paying off.

But we can’t imagine any athlete descending from the medal box to say, I did this for the Rolex!

The Arroyo administration made certain to celebrate the country’s first-ever overall championship of the Southeast Asian Games a year ago, in style; the least it could have done this year was to ask a worthy representative, perhaps even Pacquiao himself, to wait on the gold medalists and welcome them on the public’s behalf. That would have been a homecoming worth remembering.