2021 year of crossroads

We’ve been slowly inching our way out of our forced hibernation, and living tensely with a virus hanging in the air around us. The braver ones have started tweaking their way of doing things to be able to bring life to a semblance of what it once was. New trends are emerging, and will carry on into 2021. What will the next year in sports look like? Here are a few milestones we expect.

A sober Tokyo Olympics. The Olympics simply must push through in 2021, or else the International Olympic Committee will declare them cancelled and Japan loses billions of dollars in infrastructure and marketing. To this day, the Tokyo Organizing Committee has not announced if there will be live audiences in the venues during the Games. This means that the media will play a bigger role in either encouraging or cautioning the public about attending. So far, Christmas movie releases in theaters have not done well. The revelation of a mutated coronavirus in the UK may have some spillover effect on planned travel to the Games.

Hanoi’s wait and see. The Southeast Asian Games will be in Vietnam in November, and there are similarly few details about how the competitions will be conducted. This will be the focus of most of Filipino athletes, as only a maximum of about 12 of them will qualify for Tokyo. The impact of reopening many sports internationally in the first quarter of 2021 will go a long way in showing how the SEA Games will be conducted.

Chess and esports will dominate the market. As revealed in the Games and Amusements Board’s recent second Professional Sports Summit, two sports at the opposite end of the technological spectrum have bloomed by at least 500 percent during quarantine. More and more of the confined are studying chess and esports to pass the time, keep in touch and consider it as a profession. With the inclusion of esports in the Olympics and the creation of a professional chess league, things look bright for both, beyond any doubt.

A new old player. Philippine sports broadcasting will see People’s Television retake its position of leadership in the industry. General manager Kat de Castro leads a team of veteran broadcast executives in reviving sports as a staple of the network. The government broadcaster has the largest library of multi-sport competitions in the country, dating back decades. Historically, PTV has pioneered in primers and other formats in building up to the Olympics, Asian Games and SEA Games. The plan is to strengthen weekend prime time programming with two projects. A new show will focus primarily on national athletes while the other one will be the revival of a long-running, award-winning magazine show that was on another network for 13 years.

More predictions for 2021 in an upcoming column. A blessed, safe New Year to all.