Quest for Olympic gold

Amidst glitters and fireworks, the 30th Olympic Games opened in London last week and will run for three weeks with athletes from 200 countries or so participating.
With the unprecedented pompous opening ceremonies, the battle for the medals among the best athletes in the world also started.
As of this writing, China, host of the Games four years ago, continues to dominate the London Olympics with the most number of gold medals followed by the United States and as the games draw to a close it is predicted that China will continue its domination of the quadrennial games.
For the Philippines, hoping against hope for a medal or two and the Olympic gold with the leanest delegation of 11 athletes, its dreams started to crumble from the opening day itself with the loss of its touted swimmer Jessie Khing Lacuna. Then, one by one, weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz and shooter Brian Rosario got eliminated. The day was saved when the smallest man in the team, boxer Mark Anthony Barriga, scored an impressive victory over his taller Italian opening, sending him to the group of 16 and buoying hopes of the Philippines for a medal, although Barriga has yet to surmount five more opponents to score a chance for the medal.
The London Olympics would have been a good rallying point for the Filipino athletes because it was here where the first Filipino-American athlete, Victoria Manalo Draves of San Francisco, won not just one but two gold medals in the 1948 Games. But Filipino sports officials missed the chance to bouy the spirit of the Filipino athletes.
Another rallying point could be Filipino-American swimmer Natalie Coughlin, the “winningest” American Olympian, who hails from Vallejo also in the Bay Area. Coughlin had won several gold, silver and bronze medals in the Beijing, Sydney and Athens Olympics.
Properly trained like FilAms Draves and Coughlin, the Filipino athletes could compete well in the Olympiad.
But the whole trouble is that the Philippine government has no honest-to-goodness sports program because, sadly, they consider sports only as a form of entertainment. Seriously, the Philippines has won several medals in the Olympiad. We have Leopoldo Serrantes in 1988 and Roel Valasco in 1992 , both bronze medals, and the latter’s younger brother Mansueto in 1996. Five of the country’s nine medal harvests in the quadrennial meet came from boxing, including the first silver courtesy of Anthony Villanueva in 1964 and a bronze by his father Jose “Cely” Villanueva in 1932.
Other Filipino bronze medal winners were swimmer Teofilo Yldofonso, the only Filipino to have bagged the medal back-to-back in 1928 and 1932, high-jumper Simeon Toribio, also in 1932, and 400-meter hurdler Miguel White in 1936. We were also making good in basketball for a time.
Can the Filipino win the elusive Olympic medals again and the gold? Yes, the Filipino can. But only when these Filipino athletes could get the kind of training and support that their rival athletes have been getting. Until then, they could only try and hope for a miracle, which still can happen once in many lifetimes.