Dreaming of Olympic Gold

If the objective of the Philippine Olympic committee is to win gold in Olympic Cycling, then road racing and track wouldn’t be a good discipline to do it. Mountain bike and BMX have a better chance, IMO. While road racing is the very essence of cycling, it is expensive and the least effective in terms of team cohesion.

If you have watched closely the women’s road race. The Dutch fielded 4 of the best cyclists in the world. Yet, they lost it to an Austrian, who is not even a pro cyclist.

A single MTB and BMX athlete can train with only a few staff and for shorter distances ergo, less expense for this discipline.  A roadie needs domestiques aka support riders, to basically keep him out of crashes, bring food and water, give up a bicycle in case of a mechanical problem during a race- things not needed in MBT and BMX. Therefore

Why are we talking expenses here? That’s because if we want to win gold, then we must open up our coffers to support the athlete to be the best. However, our officials don't want to dig deep into the pockets for cycling for reasons I can’t understand.

The “Integrated Cycling Federation of the Philippines” (Philcycling) is the national governing body for cycling in the Philippines and is recognized by the Philippine Sports Commission and the Philippine Olympic Committee. The POC is independent of the PSC and the POC, not the PSC, is the one responsible for sending athletes to the Olympics. Since the PSC is a government agency, it has politics written all over it. And when politics is the art of an organization, ineptness is not far behind. The relationship between the POC and the PSC is sometimes contentious and until today, I still don’t know where the boundaries of its similarities and differences end.

You can only imagine the gauntlet that the cyclist will have to go through just to be able to get selected to the national pool. I’m not even including nepotism at this point.

John is a very good cyclist and at 19 years old, has the potential to be very good. He excels in local races and is the best cyclist in the province of Cebu. However, the “good” cyclist is not wealthy, and needs all the support he can get. To realize his dream to go to the Olympics, he needs financial support to begin with.  So who pays for that?

The best way is to join the Armed Forces (Re: Hidilyn Diaz). If he is good, he’ll be taken in, get paid as a soldier but trains as a cyclist. To do that John has to go to Manila to train and race and get noticed, and leave home for months. Since you can’t be a soldier right away, you have to find a part time job so that you can train on the other time. Salary from a job like that isn’t enough for food and a bed to sleep. And I’m not talking about equipment  yet.

If he gets noticed, then he goes to the Armed Forces. There, John will hone his craft and hopes a window of opportunity will open up. Cross fingers.