Any criteria for 10 priority sports

Recently, the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) has decided to identify 10 priority sports and 150 athletes who will be given special attention in terms of allowances, intensive training and coaching in the Philippines and overseas and competitions abroad, among other benefits. Obviously this tack was taken after sports officials emerged from a meeting in Malacañang late last year after the Philippines’ worst-ever finish in the Jakarta-Palembang, Indonesia games in November 2011. The instruction is clear: make good with what you have by focusing on a few sports instead of trying to satisfy 44 or so national sports associations (NSAs) who all claim that “the Filipino has the potential to excel and win gold medals in their sport”. In short, the PSC cannot (and should not) be everything to everyone.

This strategy will force the PSC (and all its partners, like the Philippine Olympic Committee) to bite the bullet so to speak and engage in what is definitely a politically-charged exercise. I can already see the objections of an NSA not included in the list of priority sports which is headed by a legislator or some other influential person threatening reprisal against PSC (in the form of budget cuts) for his or her NSA not being included in the list.

Several years ago, during our tenure at the PSC, we commissioned the Philippine Survey Research Center (PSRC) to do a nationwide survey on views and preferences of Filipinos with respect to sports that they prefer to watch and/or participate in. The survey was to be used as a basis for precisely the exercise that the PSC is now going through: before embarking on such an exercise, we needed to get a pulse of what the people felt. We had taken our cue from the Australian Sports Commission (ASC), which had gone through a similar contentious exercise but succeeded in finally establishing the priority sports which change periodically based on the performance or non-performance of the sports association.

I told the ASC of our plan to go through the same exercise and they warned me of the bitter debate it engendered but in the end, they said one’s political will, intestinal fortitude and the support of the head of government were most crucial.

While the debates to be triggered by the listing of sports were expected, they could be more thoughtful and productive if there were logical, clear and explainable bases for the priority listing. In short, criteria were needed to obviate charges of favoritism, political horse trading, palakasan, being whimsical and arbitrary. If proven the selection was heavily influenced by such factors, then the entire exercise would have been less than honest and will just create more problems than it was intended to solve. 

It is clear therefore that a lot of quantitative and qualitative analysis have to be done to arrive at a list that can be defended, as they say, “anywhere, including Plaza Miranda.” Knowing the culture of the Filipino (and the Filipino sports official) there will be a lot of grumblings when such a list comes out. But the trick is to lessen such disputes by using hard data and criteria which are unassailable or less vulnerable to attack.

One criterion is obviously the number of gold medals at stake in the sport and its associated disciplines. Obviously, athletics (track and field), swimming and aquatics and shooting will top the list for sheer number of gold medals. The three sports collectively account for more than 120 gold medals in any Olympic-type competition.

Another is the NSA’s record despite the lack of government funding and the political turmoil ever present in Philippine sports. Records of the athletes’ performance and their standing relative to athletes of other countries are available and just need to be studied carefully and extrapolated to arrive at some educated guess about the future. We should have none of these garbage predictions which were plucked from thin air without even looking at past performance. Corollary to the athletes’ performance is the leadership of the NSA itself and its administrative capability.

Some NSA’s may not even have a fax machine, email addresses or website or even offices to speak of. How can one entrust a multi-million program to an NSA which needs a lot of institutional strengthening and capability building? Some NSA officials may not have even found the time to visit their office, if they have, and talk to the people in the office (if they have people running the administrative affairs of the organization).

Next week, we shall discuss additional criteria for sports prioritization. We tried this in the latter part of our term but could not implement it because of the change in administration. There was opposition even within PSC to the list that we formulated based on objective quantitative and qualitative factors.