We can’t breathe

Sports reveal who we are as individuals and as a people. Like art, it mimics life. Just like success in life, sports excellence demands discipline, hard work, character, talent and opportunity. And priorities.

It baffles why track and field is obscure in this country, despite Lydia de Vega, twice sprint queen of Asia and Elma Muros, the multi-titled sprinter, long jumper, hurdler and heptathlete of Southeast Asia. Filipinos embraced and loved them, but not the sport they excelled in. Women should have been inspired by their triumphs to develop interest in a sport that entails most basic human activities – running, jumping and throwing. You only need to run the fastest, jump the highest or throw the farthest to win. But no, our attention is somewhere else.

Another sport that continues to earn little interest from this archipelagic country is swimming. Ironic, a nation studded with thousands of islands surrounded by bodies of water has not made waves in international swimming since Akiko Thomson and Eric Buhain although last year James Deiparine somehow resurrected them by ending a 10-year gold medal drought in the SEA Games. But of late, some quarantine violators were either punished for swimming or with swimming.

Sports teach us life lessons too. Strategy is one. In non-bearing matches, players merely scout and measure up each other for the match that matters. But there is no non-bearing life. It has been born. It is as important as any other life, be it black, brown or white. More so for a life taken because it is colored differently from the taker. Such arrogance and ignorance, we don’t know which came first or factors more. Either way or both, it deserves righteous indignation.

Blame it partly on the way we define beauty or measure excellence or how commercials ram it down our throats. In art, colors have nuances for different uses. In life, races differ in color, size or height, but not one looks better than the other, we just look different from each other. Uniqueness is what tells us apart, but from equality we should not depart.

 Athletes prepare hard but still fear many things – failure, injury, playing conditions, even the fans. Just as there are many things in life humans fear – money, health, safety and other survival issues, including laws more terrifying than the acts they penalize.

There are sports heroes we love to adore, especially the underdogs whose humility is already victory. Then there are sports villains we love to hate, especially those whose confidence exceed their abilities. We despise them to temper their excesses, but we do not become them. Just as when we criticize laws, it does not make us the criminals these laws seek to punish. To crime or terror we do not consent, against abuse we dissent.

In sports, players play by the rules they understand and accept fair and square. Play and obey else disqualified. When unreasonable laws are enforced, some people ask why complain, just follow. We can do both, obey and complain. It is not an act of terror. It corrects the error.

Then there are edge-of-your-seat matches that go down the wire – deciding sets, tiebreaks, the last round, the last inning or the last two minutes of game seven. Nail biting, these matches take our breath away even if no superior strength restrains us, not even by the neck.