Gold

August 8, 2024

MANILA – It began—our participation, as a country, in the Olympic Games—in Paris, in 1924. It was only in 1916 that the Philippines had Filipino leadership of the Philippine Amateur Athletic Federation (known as the Philippine Olympic Committee or POC since 1975) and was given the pledge of eventual independence by the United States Congress, and could fly our flag again in 1919. But we had to wait until the first Olympiad after World War I.

A century later, Filipinos everywhere are thrilled at the victory of not one, but two gold medals in gymnastics, and the sight of our flag and the strains of our national anthem—with its third part, a homage to the revolutionary anthem of France—representing national glory. Though University of the Philippines professor Ben Vallejo took pains to point out our anthem was performed to mark a victory, in Seoul in 1988, “when Arianne Cerdeña won her demonstration bowling gold.”

Between Paris 1924 and 2024 were generations of striving, from our first Olympic medal, Teofilo Yldefonso’s swimming bronze in Amsterdam in 1928, and his second, in 1932 in Los Angeles, when he and two others achieved our best showing until 2020 when Hidilyn Diaz, who at last won a weightlifting gold in the Tokyo Games.

Yldefonso, who captained our swimming team in three Olympiads (and even made a brief appearance in Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Games, where Miguel White won a bronze in the hurdles), died of gangrene in a prison camp in Capas, after having been wounded in Bataan—what an athlete turned citizen soldier began in Amsterdam was achieved by another athlete-turned-soldier, Diaz, in 2020. There were father and son achievers—the boxers Jose Villanueva (bronze, Los Angeles,