Great moments in PH Sports

AS Inquirer Bandera embarks on its 26th year, allow me to reminisce some of the great moments in Philippine Sports in the past two-and-half decades.

There were the good and bad times, and the successes and the failures, the highs and the lows, and the heroes and the villains.

However, nothing beats recalling the triumphant performances of our athletes, the “feel good” ones that make us proud as Filipinos and are worthy of a recall a thousand times or more.

In December 1991, the Philippines placed second in the overall medal tally of the Southeast Asian Games held in Manila, garnering 90 golds (and 62 silvers, 84 bronzes for a 236 total harvest) to frontrunner Indonesia’s 92 golds (and 86 silvers and 69 bronze for a sum of 247).

Until now, the 16th SEAG was the most heavily contested in the history of the biennial multi-sport competition in terms of overall championship.

Then, there was all-time sports great Rafael (Paeng) Nepomuceno’s unprecedented achievements in international tenpin bowling.

In 1992, the southpaw Nepomuceno topped the Bowling World Cup for a third time in LeMans, France. Four years later, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he captured his fourth WC hardware.

The De La Salle University-educated Nepomuceno had won the quadrennial World Cup for the first time in 1976 in Tehran, Iran at the age of 19 and repeated four years later (1980) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Nepomuceno is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for 1-for most Bowling World Cup victories, four, in three different decades; 2-for being the youngest ever to snare the Bowling World Cup; and 3-for having won the most number of bowling tournament titles with more than 130 in his distinguished career.

Paeng, now age 59, is the only bowling athlete in the country to have received the prestigious International Olympic Committee President’s trophy and was the first international male bowling athlete to be enshrined in the International Bowling Hall of Fame and Museum based in Arlington, Texas in 1993 where his seven-foot image is displayed at the Museum’s entrance.

In November 1999, the Federation Internationale des Quilleurs (FIQ) named Nepomuceno as the “International Bowling Athlete of the Millennium.”

In the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, USA, boxer Mansueto (Onyok) Velasco settled for the silver medal – the country’s second overall since making its Olympic debut in 1924 in Amsterdam, Netherlands – after allegedly being cheating out of a gold in the finals bout of the light flyweight division against Bulgaria’s Daniel Petrov by a score of 19-6.

The Bago City, Negros Occidental-born Velasco’s controversial loss was described by local sportswriters as “The Robbery in Atlanta.”

Velasco, who was one of three Filipino boxers to earn gold medals during the 1994 Asian Games in Hiroshima, Japan, subsequently joined the entertainment world as a comedian.

Exactly two decades after Velasco’s Olympic silver finish, a Filipina athlete also made the country proud by romping away with the silver medal in weightlifting in last month’s Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

It was all about hard work, persistence and perseverance but a third consecutive appearance in the quadrennial Olympiad turned out to be a lucky charm for Hidilyn Diaz.

Diaz was the first female Olympic medalist from the Philippines – bringing the country’s overall medal count to three silvers and seven bronzes – and likewise the first to win a medal from the sport weightlifting.

Just like the many other Filipinos that have taken strong interest in our athletes’ performance in the various international sporting arenas, the country looks forward to the dawning of new age in Philippine Sports under the new dispensation.

Who knows, by the time Inquirer Bandera marks its 30th year of circulation in 2020, a Filipino athlete would have also made history as the country’s first Olympic gold medalist in the Tokyo Games.

Nothing is impossible. Impossible is nothing.