Rivero goes for broke in RP’s medal drive

BEIJING – Mary Antoinette Rivero will try to accomplish what teammate Tshomlee Go failed to achieve in the men’s division, but she will need all the guts, breaks and prayers to pass through the proverbial eye of the needle in the welterweight event of the Beijing Olympics taekwondo competitions today.

Every stage on her way to a medal won’t be easy for the 20-year-old Athens Olympian who will face 2007 tormentor Sandra Saric of Croatia in the first round and, if successful, probably the world’s top two jins who also defeated her in previous international campaigns.

A loss in the round of 16 or quarterfinal round will relegate Rivero to the repechage or throw her out of the medal round for good depending on whether the player who beat her entered the final round.

A win in the semifinal round assures her of the silver and a chance for the country’s first-ever gold medal since the Philippines’ Olympic participation in 1924.

A loss will bring her back to memories of the 2004 Athens Olympics where she lost to Korean world champion Hwang Hyung-seon and missed the bronze when she bowed to Greek favorite Elisavet Mystikadou in the repechage.

The bouts start at 10 a.m. in the playing hall of the Beijing University of Science and Technology before an expected full house crowd that had booked all tickets two months in advance.

Rivero did her routine stretching and bending exercises and a light workout before her 4 p.m. weigh-in for the 57-67kg event yesterday.

Her entire family – her mother Marilou and father Manuel and her brothers RJ and Mark – had come here Tuesday to cheer the only daughter in the family.

Also expected to be in the stands are First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, chef de mission Monico Puentevella, Philippine Olympic Committee president Jose “Peping” Cojuangco, Philippine Sports Commission chairman William “Butch” Ramirez and taekwondo president Robert Aventajado.

National coaches Kim Hong Sik of Korea and Rocky Samson, who will work her corner today, had put her in seclusion, away from the prying eyes of foreign and Manila journalists as she prepared for a make-or-break bid for the country’s first and last medal in the Olympics.

Aventajado,who talked to her over the cellphone on behalf of reporters, said  Rivero was in high spirits and is putting all pressures aside and is “looking forward to my fight tomorrow.”

“I had confidence from the start that she will push through. She has a big heart and she comes from a family of fighters,” said Aventajado of Rivero, whose father runs a taekwondo gym in the West Coast while her brothers are taekwondo practitioners who inspired her at age 4 to take up the sport.

“I know the country’s  behind me, I will do my best,” she said.