For Philippine sports to fully flourish in the future, the government must be keen in investing in long-term facilities and programs for its athletes, bared two sports officials last Tuesday.
Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) Chairman William "Butch" Ramirez said at the Philippine Sportswriters Association Forum webcast that the state must dole out for the improvement of the Philippine Sports Institute, where sports science could be used to enhance athletes' performance.
"If you can see the [four Olympic medalists], they're not like the foreign ones who went through sports science that is cutting edge," explained Ramirez, referring to gold medalist weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz and boxers Nesthy Petecio and Carlo Paalam, who both won silver, and Eumir Marcial, who won bronze.
"There's performance science, physiological performance testing, resting metabolic, lactate threshold, metabolic efficiency," he furthered.
Because of inadequate sporting facilities and programs for elite Filipino athletes, the PSC has had to settle for sending them abroad for training that leans on sports science.
"The government, seeing the success from the Tokyo Olympics, must put these cutting-edge sports sciences in our training because if there's nothing like this, we can't achieve [the same] goals in Paris, L.A., and Brisbane," explained Ramirez, as he looked ahead to the next Olympic editions.
For now, the only thing the PSC could concretely do is strike a dialogue with the Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) in order to codify a game plan that could be updated with the times for future Olympic campaigns.
For its part, the POC, generally in charge with the development of national athletes, agreed that, as of the moment, overseas training remains the best option. According to POC President Abraham "Bambol" Tolentino, they are eyeing an agreement with the Qatar National Olympic Committee to send Filipino athletes there for cutting-edge training, free of charge.
Philippine bets would not need to leave their home to get better, however, if a Department of Sports is re-established to take charge of the country's woeful sporting facilities and programs, according to Tolentino.
Sports was previously entwined within the Ministry/Department of Education, Culture, and Sports at the cabinet level from 1982 until 2001, when Culture and Sports were excised from the functions of the department. The PSC, meantime, was established in 1990 and is directly under the supervision of the Office of the President.
With an establishment of a sports department, funding could increase to tens of billions of pesos, much more than the P1.3B allocated to national athletes by the 2021 budget.
Even more, Tolentino reiterated his aspirations of an office building for the POC, as ever since the Philippine Amateur Athletic Federation, the committee's predecessor established in 1911, it has not had a permanent place to call home. Currently, the POC office is located in the outskirts of the Philsports Complex in Pasig, while previously, it stayed at the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex.
The Cavite solon was visibly irked when he recollected how the Cultural Center of the Philippines denied their request to rent office space inside the Philippine International Cultural Center last February. The plan then was to use that would-be-office as a nerve center for Team Philippines' campaign in the Tokyo Olympics.
"Good thing we knew how to sacrifice. We just met in coffee shops, because everybody knows offices are closed due to the [COVID-19] pandemic," said Tolentino.
"We have already given honor, hello? Perhaps they could already give us attention. After 97 years [in the Olympics], it hurts to say, we're still informal settlers...how can we give inspiration to citizens, to children, if they can't even see an office building?" he added.