Mark Anthony Barriga. Maristella Torres. I urge all Filipinos wherever they may be — at home in the Philippines or living as expats in other countries — to please memorize these two names.
Mark Anthony Barriga is a lightflyweight amateur boxer. Maristella Torres is a long jump athlete. They are the only two Filipino athletes who have qualified so far for the 2012 London Olympics. And there may very well be no more other than just the two of them.
For with the London Olympics, to be held from the last week of July to the second week of August, just a short six months away, it is very unlikely that more athletes will be added to the Philippine delegation.
There could still be one wee bit of a chance that a third Filipino athlete might make the cut. But that’s it. No more than that. That chance belongs to another boxer, lightweight Charly Suarez who won the gold in the Southeast Asian Games in Indonesia last year.
The make-or-break chance for Suarez, and indeed for the whole Philippines, will come on March 30 to April 8 when he competes for the Olympic qualifying Asian championships in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.
The bad news is, there is only one more slot remaining to qualify fot the Olympics in the lightweight division. The division originally had seven slots set aside for Asian qualifiers, including one of the so-called wild card slots, but five have already been taken.
In international sports such as the Olympics, wild card slots are given to countries that fail to produce athletes able to meet performance requirements to enable them to send competitors even if the abilities of these competitors are below the required standards.
But according to a report by Philippine Star’s Quinito Henson, new rules have swung into effect that virtually eliminated a backdoor entry for any Philippine athlete to the Olympics via a wild card slot.
In a bid to ensure universality of the Games, wild card slots are now to be given only to countries that have sent an average of just six athletes or less in the past two Olympics, thus disqualifying the Philippines from benefitting from the scheme.
In Athens in 2004, the Philippines sent a total of 16 athletes, while in the 2006 Beijing Games, the country sent 15. The only chance, therefore, for the Philippines to bring the number of its delegation up to three rests squarely on the fists of Suarez in Kazakhstan.
I will not comment on the skills of Suarez as I have not seen him fight. But being a SEAG gold medalists is different from winning the gold in the much bigger and deeper pond that is the Asian olympic qualifiers. To make it to London, Suarez has to win the gold in Astana as well.
Of course, Philippine sports being what it is, it has sort of become automatic for our sports officials to try and look up at the ceiling for answers, as if international competitions are a throwback to grade school.
According to the Henson report in Philstar, Philippine chef de mission to London Manny Lopez has not lost hope in sending up to six athletes despite our elimination from wild card eligibility.
Lopez reportedly has set his eyes (and pathetically the nation’s hopes as well) on the sheer chance that unused slots — slots already won and awarded but whose awardees, for whatever reason, could not make it to London — would fall on our laps.
And the Philippine strategy, outlined by Lopez, is to stay in the good graces of sports federations where such unused slots may occur, in the off-chance they may grant such slots to us. What a shame that our participation in the Olympics has to rely on such a flimsy strategy.