Whipping boys, if not decorations, in every Olympiad

By Al S. Mendoza

THERE are two ways to approach every Olympic Games to keep our sanity.

One, we are going there not to win medals.

Two, we are going there as a commitment to world peace through sports.

Only about 30 of the 204 participating nations in the London Olympics will win gold medals.

The rest will go home empty-handed.

There will be a few lucky ones, like Guatemala winning the silver in men’s walkathon for its first ever Olympic medal.

The Top 5 winners in the Modern Olympiad’s 30th staging will capture at least 10 gold medals each, led by China, US, Great Britain, South Korea and Russia.

The Chinese, who started competing in the Olympics in the 1984 Los Angeles Games, were third in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, second in the 2004 Athens Olympics and, finally, first in Beijing in 2008 with a collection of 51 gold medals.

We first saw Olympic action in the 1928 Amsterdam Games but, sadly(?),  our total medal tally today is a measly eight.

And of those eight, not even a single gold to boot.

Well, can you also call it ironic that after we won a bronze medal in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, through Teofilo Yldefonso in men’s swimming 200-m breaststroke, our best finish after that was a couple of silver medals in boxing that came decades apart?

Yldefonso placed third again in the next Olympics in 1932 in Los Angeles, where Simeon Toribio also won a bronze in men’s high jump.

Yldefonso, from Piddig, Ilocos Norte, placed 7th in 1936 in Berlin and Toribio, from Tagbilaran, Bohol, was also out of the medal count that year.

But we managed to win in Berlin through Miguel White, who took the bronze in the men’s 400-m hurdles.

Then World War II broke out, torpedoing the Olympic Games.

Yldefonso, the country’s only double-medal Olympic winner, was a Death March victim in Capas, Tarlac, where he died as a soldier in a concentration camp on June 19, 1942.  He was only 39.

The Olympics resumed in 1948 but it was not until the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that we won again, through the boxing silver of Anthony Villanueva.

We would next suffer a drought of five Olympiads before Leopoldo Serrante ended the losing streak with a boxing bronze in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.  In 1992, Roel Velasco salvaged another boxing bronze.

And then, after the boxing silver in 1996 in Atlanta by Onyok Velasco (Roel’s brother), the winless streak would hound us again four times from 2000 to 2012.

When we should be improving every Olympiad after 1936, we were, instead, retrogressing.

Why?  Because we are a poor country.  And poor countries, because sports isn’t their priorities, can only produce poor athletes.  That simple.

To be friends with the world through Olympic participation, and not to win medals through Olympic competition – that’s what has become of us now every time we go to the Olympic Games.

But we are not alone.  We are that many among the 204 nations that saw action in the just-ended London Olympics.

So get this:  Poor countries are mere whipping boys by the First World nations, if not mere decorations in every Olympiad.

That simple.

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