Tuason urges early buildup for Asiad

The stars of the last Southeast Asian Games in Kuala Lumpur will get the best training possible especially through foreign exposure and coaching to prepare them for the Pusan Asian Games next year, Philippine Sports Commission chair Carlos "Butch" Tuason said yesterday.

Tuason said the Philippines faces a big task of forming a potent contingent for the Korean mission in 2002, thus the need to buckle down to work early.

An even bigger goal, however, is soliciting the generous help of multinationals and other big firms to sustain the Asiad buildup, according to Tuason.

Though the tracksters who became the toast of the SEAG for the local delegation will be given special attention, the rest of the gold medal winners plus a number who had narrow misses and settled for silvers can expect to enjoy the full resources of the PSC.

At the same time, Tuason said they can only take in stride the criticisms thrown at them for the country’s fifth-place, 30-gold medal showing in the Malaysian capital.

"We sports leaders can only try to stand the test of time. We went to Kuala Lumpur having set our modest goals and we were ready to deal with the joys and pains of the expedition," he said.

"Yes, we may not have met our goals, but we did not do badly either. As we’ve always been saying, we are proud of our athletes no matter what and we treasure every medal won by each of them whether it’s gold, silver or bronze."

While it is so easy for some people to be going on a media blitz downgrading their efforts, Tuason said he feels even sad for a silver medal winner whose feat is now being tagged as "mediocre." Some of these athletes were injured in the preliminary rounds and despite their injuries they still played.

Richie Garcia, who headed the Task Force which supervised the preparation of the SEAG bets, said a deeper understanding on how our athletes fared against their rivals will prove that winning 66 medals could not have been achieved if the athletes weren’t prepared to give their best for our country.

"There’s so much fuss about our losing to Vietnam for fourth place when in fact, it went down to the wire," Garcia said.

"We have certainly shown signs of improvement and we should sustain the momentum for us to be ready for the next mission."