Beyond Paris

It’s no use saying, “We are doing our best.” You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary. – Winston Churchill

We have less than two years before the Paris Olympics, so we should, by all rights, be sounding the alarm. Paris has already added sports to the roster of events to be played, like judo, diving, fencing, rugby, and a few others. But the Philippines is in a bit of an awkward situation time wise, having just finished one Southeast Asian Games with only nine months left before the next one. Cambodia will, additionally, be hosting for the first time, so it’s natural to expect some hitches. The sooner the board of the Philippine Sports Commission is filled up, the sooner preparations can run at full speed.

But if we are to truly look forward, then we should set our sights on the 2028 Los Angeles Games also. (LA has offered to be the permanent home of the Olympics, which of course the mostly European International Olympic Committee leadership politely ignored.) However, the initial program released by Los Angeles (which first hosted the Games in 1932 and 1984) omitted the sports that Filipino athletes brought home medals from Tokyo.

The IOC has provisionally left boxing and weightlifting (and modern pentathlon) from its core list of sports for 2028. Skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing have been added to the calendar in an attempt to increase appeal to the youth, as per the announcement last March. Of course, the IOC can restore the three omitted sports next year, but it doesn’t look good. All of the country’s Tokyo Olympic medals came from weightlifting and boxing. Though there is promise in gymnastics (Caloy Yulo) and athletics (EJ Obiena), this impending development could be a major setback for Philippine sports.

In June, investigator Richard McLaren warned that boxing (meaning the federation AIBA) needed to change its ways or be removed from the Olympics permanently. AIBA commissioned McLaren to do a deep dive into its affairs after the association was removed in 2019. A Japanese gymnastics official conducted the events in Tokyo, where the Philippines won three medals, a silver from Nesthy Petecio and bronzes from Carlo Paalam and Eumir Marcial. In McLaren’s 114-page report, he cited faulty judging and corruption by AIBA from 2006 to 2017, including in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games.

“The people in the sport must change,” McLaren said at a news conference as 22 AIBA officials were removed. “They have ingrained learned behaviors in a culture that has historically not respected ethics or integrity.”

Meanwhile, the International Weightlifting Federation held a convention before Tokyo to make changes in its policies. However, it did not get the quorum it needed to pass the changes. IWF has suffered from over 50 confirmed cases of steroid use in the three Olympics and other international events before Tokyo. Since 2016, the number of participating athletes has progressively shrunk. As it stands, by 2028 the sport itself could be eliminated entirely, as this writer warned last year.

The good news for both sports is that the Philippines is among the countries actively moving to make those sports better. The country’s success in Tokyo has propelled a surge in participation in weightlifting and boxing. Many elite athletes also argue that weightlifting is part of training in almost every sport, while boxing has always been the sparse sport of the masses. There is time to initiate reforms necessary to avoid exclusion from future Olympics. It would be hard for an athlete to train under the uncertainty of competing at the highest level of the sport in just a few years’ time.