It’s time Filipinos rise up from their Rip van Winkle-like slumber and ask: Why should Jose “Peping” Cojuangco get another four years to run Philippine sports? What collective sins have we accumulated as a people to deserve his leadership?
In 2016, amid all the rejoicing that chased the Yellow Army’s banishment, it is time to stand up and shout out: “Let us save Philippine sports from Peping and his gang.” To quote from a prominent columnist from another newspaper, the present Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) leadership, of which he is top honcho, “epitomizes the debasement of sports governance.”
If Peping has any shred of patriotism left in his heart, he should stand down from this month’s POC election. Philippine sports needs a vision by a true sportsman—not a gaggle of politicians who have raised the biggest roadblock to renewal.
For 12 years since his first election as POC chief in 2004, he has had excellent chances to do better, break more national records, win more medals and create more stars out of inadequately trained elite athletes than his most eminent predecessor Michael Keon ever did in the 80s.
We were not losers, but contenders, in the SEA Games. Through his remarkable Project: Gintong Alay training program for elite athletes, Keon inaugurated an age of renewal and high achievement for the Filipino athlete. Isidro del Prado, Hector Begeo and Elma Muros were among the generation of athletes that became part of Keon’s legacy.
Unforgettably, he gave us track star Lydia de Vega, the gazelle who twice topped the Asian Games women’s century dash, in 1982 and 1986, epitomizing the glittering success of Keon’s training program for elite athletes.
What is the difference between Keon and Cojuangco as POC president?
Peping’s POC will readily claim that the comparison is odious because Keon had the backing of Ferdinand Marcos and one-man rule then, and Cojuangco is a post-dictatorship president.
But he cannot dispute the fact that Keon had supervised his athletes in training and regimented them in Baguio City’s Teacher’s Camp with the expert coaching provided to them by that Australian long-distance specialist Anthony Benson. In short, he knew and provided the training that athletes competing at the highest level would need. That was because, at heart, Keon was a true sportsman.
But I heard Keon’s name is cyanide to Cojuangco for the imbecile reason that Gintong Alay was Keon’s brand. He would want no replication of Keon’s gem that made our people stand proud and celebrate with a frenzy of flag-waving in the grandstands before the most lustrous competition in the Asian Games—the 100-meter dash—in New Delhi and Seoul.
In effect, under Cojuangco, the POC has dishonored history, its own. Being a rejectionist of its best lessons, he has offered no competing vision simply because he seems incapable of imagining it. One pundit even suggested the extreme that Peping has foreclosed the idea of excellence, citing the Philippine performance in the Southeast Asian Games, the barometer of success in our region.
The last 12 years
Instead of excellence, Peping gave us mediocrity. After our historical high, a Southeast Asian (SEA) Games championship in 2005, look where the Philippines is now, and we understand perfectly why Peping should be booted out of the POC.
Instead of pulling up the Philippines in the SEA Games rankings, he has caused our country’s steady decline. We have fallen so deep down that not only are we badly trailing Indonesia and Thailand, formerly our top rivals, but also Vietnam, Malaysia and the pesky island-nation of Singapore, which has produced the super-swimmer Joseph Schooling, who beat Michael Phelps of pool legend in the Rio Olympics’ 100-meter butterfly. Singapore won its first-ever Olympic gold medal.
The few men in Peping’s narrow circle would readily point out Hidilyn Diaz’s silver in weightlifting as a crowning glory of his POC leadership. Well, not too fast. She was a God-sent miracle in an otherwise Stygian POC handling of her Olympic training.
She was, in fact, every inch an outsider in his circle. Banished from the national training pool after winning a mere bronze in the last SEA Games, Diaz almost quit her sport in frustration. And who put her back into competitive form? No one from Peping’s POC gang for sure, not even the head of the Weightlifting Association, who got the credit in Rio for something he did not earn.
No one because, in the afterglow of her Olympic silver, it was Hidilyn’s self-sacrificing disposition that stood out as her greatest strength and the pursuit of a cherished dream her main motivation.
Someone did come to her aid, an unselfish, self-sacrificing soul and a POC outsider named Jay Futalan, a strength and conditioning coach. After badly failing in the 2012 Olympics, she was found to have problems with her knees and hips, and her mechanics had to be patiently improved on. She never needed any official help and encouragement.
So, does Philippine sports need a new man in the POC?
Definitely. A man with a passion for sports and a desire for winning—with a clear vision, road map if you will, to achieve it, a man so much unlike Cojuangco. One need not be a psychic or a rocket scientist to fathom why he could never succeed in his post. He is a politician first and foremost.
Giving him four more years at the helm of a rudderless ship that has no clear destination would be a national tragedy.