Good for only demos

While the country’s haul of a gold, a silver and two bronzes from wushu was significant in Beijing, you wonder if Filipino athletes are good for only demonstration sports where medals don’t count in the Olympic standings?

Since 1988, the Philippines has collected two golds, a silver and four bronzes from three demonstration sports in the Olympics. In comparison, the harvest was only a silver and two bronzes in a single Olympic sport - boxing - during that period.

It seems that when regular Olympic medals are up for grabs, the Philippines disappears in the background.  No Filipino athlete has collected an Olympic medal since Onyok Velasco’s silver in 1996, meaning shutouts in Sydney, Athens and Beijing.

This isn’t meant to downgrade the efforts of Willy Wang and company in Beijing. They trained long and hard for their wushu medals and were aptly rewarded. We also don’t mean to look down on Arianne Cerdena who bagged a gold in bowling, a demonstration sport, in 1988 and Stephen Fernandez and Bea Lucero who claimed a bronze apiece in taekwondo when it was still a demonstration sport in 1992.

The Beijing wushu medalists were Wang (gold), Mary Jane Estimar (silver) and Marian Mariano and Benjie Rivera (a bronze each). Unfortunately, none of the medals qualifies for Olympic bragging rights.

The sad reality is the achievements of medalists in demonstration sports are ignored in Olympic history books.

Too bad bowling never made it to the regular Olympic calendar. Paeng Nepomuceno would’ve done the country proud at the lanes. And before wushu is ever considered, there will be other priority sports under review. As for taekwondo, it finally entered the roster in 2000 but no Filipino jin has won a medal in three Olympic stagings.

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Wushu made it to the Beijing lineup as a “special event.” It couldn’t be classified as a “demonstration sport” because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) discontinued the practice of including exhibitions after the 1992 Games. The Beijing organizers begged for an exception to showcase the Chinese martial art but conceded that medals wouldn’t be counted in the Olympic honor roll.

In Beijing, the calendar listed 28 sports broken down into 38 disciplines and 302 events. Aquatics, for instance, was in the sports category with specific disciplines of diving (eight events), swimming (34 events), synchronized swimming (two events) and water polo (two events). Another example was gymnastics, a sport with three disciplines - artistic (14 events), rhythmic (two events) and trampoline (two events).

Men’s baseball was included in the Olympic calendar in 1992 after languishing in demonstration status in 1912, 1936, 1956, 1964, 1984 and 1988. Taekwondo was a demonstration sport in 1988 and 1992 before its entry in the regular Olympic schedule in 2000.

 Basketball was a demonstration sport in 1904 and made its Olympic debut in 1936. Tennis was a demonstration sport in 1968 and 1984 before breaking through in 1992. Badminton was on demonstration in 1972 and 1988 then included in the calendar in 1992 with the mixed doubles event added in 1996.

The idea of holding a demonstration sport was to test the acceptability, popularity and competitiveness of a meaningful number of Olympic countries preparatory to inclusion in the regular calendar.

When the IOC decided to limit the roster of sports due to the unwieldy attendance of over 10,000 athletes at every Olympics, the practice of staging demonstration sports was stopped in 1992.

Baseball and softball were struck out of the calendar for the 2012 London Games but will be included in the candidates list with five others for two slots in the 2016 Olympics. Other candidates are golf, rugby, squash, karate and roller sports.

Karate is a sport where Filipinos can excel because there are different weight classifications and the competition is one-on-one where the probability of an upset is higher than in a team event.

It’s a mystery why universally popular sports like bowling and billiards should take a back seat to rugby and roller sports in the queue for Olympic recognition. Surely, bowling has a larger playing base than roller sports.

Only five sports have been in the Olympics program since 1896 - cycling, fencing, gymnastics, swimming and athletics. To become an Olympic sport, it must be widely played in at least 75 countries on four continents for men and in at least 40 countries on three continents for women.

The decision on the final Olympic calendar and host country for 2016 will be made during the IOC Congress in Copenhagen in October next year. The four leading candidates to host the Games are, in order, Tokyo, Madrid, Chicago and Rio de Janeiro. Eliminated from contention after the first review were Baku in Azerbajian, Doha in Qatar and Prague in the Czech Republic.

Two cities expressing interest to bid for 2020 were New Delhi and Rome.