National honor

An athlete who won a gold medal in the last Southeast Asian Games, but failed to match her own time record in the ongoing Asian Games, told an interviewer she was still proud of her non-performance. She said she just paced herself to be among the pack.

That’s sad. In other words, she did not play to win. If she said she lost because she lacked training and her rivals were physically superior, we can understand. But she lost even before her first step in the competition.

Hidilyn Diaz is apparently a gem and the kind of athlete who overcomes all difficulties in a drive to win.

The lady golfers who also won gold medals are in a class of their own. They play their sport to win.

The lady skateboarder who won our last gold medal in the games has a heart warming story to tell.

Our basketball team, even if they lost to China and South Korea, played to win. It was just unfortunate their opponents were better prepared, taller and most likely had more opportunities to play as a team.

Looking at our ranking in the Asian Games reveals how far we have deteriorated among our Asian peers.  We are hosting the Southeast Asian Games next year and a performance like that will be embarrassing.

I am not exactly a sports fan, but I see sports as a good way to build the character of our young people. Play to win, but lose graciously to a superior opponent. And while playing internationally, an athlete represents the country and national honor is at stake.

It is a great responsibility to carry the flag in an international competition. An athlete is like a warrior in the sense that one must play or fight to win. An athlete cannot just coast along.

Indeed, coasting along seems to be the malady afflicting our nation today. That’s why we have been losing our economic competitiveness to upstarts in the region like Vietnam and maybe soon enough, Cambodia as well.

Let us take Vietnam. A website of Yale University recently raised the strong possibility that Vietnam will soon be a global tech hub.

The Yale article observed: “Vietnam is navigating apparent contradictions. It’s a country, where nearly half the population works in agriculture, that aims to escape the middle-income trap by becoming a startup nation. It’s a communist country that tapped capitalism to average 6.4 percent GDP growth through the 2000s. More than 40 million people have escaped poverty in the last two decades…”

Yale interviewed a Vietnamese American who went back to Vietnam to establish a $10 million Vietnam-focused fund that’s aiming to invest in 100 Vietnam-connected companies. He described what makes Vietnam attractive.

“Vietnam has some great entrepreneurs, and its tech talent is increasingly being recognized. Even before we started investing here, there were a number of success stories…

“VNG could be considered the “Tencent of Vietnam” since both started off as game developers and distributors. It was Vietnam’s first unicorn. Misfit Wearables was co-founded by a Vietnamese American and substantially engineered by talent in Vietnam; it was acquired by Fossil, the watchmaker, for $260 million.

“Another example is Atlassian, an Australian-founded company that leveraged a couple hundred Vietnamese engineers to build their products up until their IPO in late 2015 on NASDAQ at a roughly $3 billion market cap…

“To put the development into perspective, when the first venture capital firm came to Vietnam in 2004, there were only about five million internet users and virtually no smartphones. Fast-forward to 2017: there are now 50 million internet users and more than 30 million smartphone users.

“Despite being a relatively poor country, Vietnam does quite well versus developed countries on PISA test scores for math and science. The universities graduate about 100,000 engineers per year.  And these engineers cost a fraction of comparable talent in Silicon Valley.”

How can a communist war torn country move so fast and leave us eating their dust? They are attracting more foreign direct investments than we are. They are exporting more to the United States than us, ironic considering we had been a loyal ally for years and Vietnam was the enemy.

Has anyone in our government figured out what Vietnam is doing that is working for them? They are graduating 100,000 engineers and almost no lawyers. There is corruption there too, but they seem to manage that better with regular purges of the bureaucracy.

And yes, they have more medals overall than us at the ongoing Asian Games.

Sports competitions and the economy are arenas where national honor is at stake. In both, we are being left behind by our regional peers and no one in authority seems concerned enough about it.

A recent article in the Financial Times talked about how investment funds are shying away from us.  

A fund manager suggested to FT that “the depreciation of the peso had less to do with the economics than the fact that Mr. Duterte ‘is a disaster’ and some people ‘don’t want to be associated with him’… We have no illusions about the murderous thug who is the current president”.

If Duterte wasn’t too focused on drugs, he might be able to show us he can make a difference in other important areas during his six year term. Duterte has no interest in sports. And he only sporadically gets involved on the economy when things like rice prices spring in the headlines.

What we need is something, some symbol that can unleash national pride, enough to unify us to get some good done.

Sports, economy, national honor! We desperately need something to unite us. Right now we are so viciously divided. And in every arena we compete in, we have to play to win and not just coast along or puede na.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco