Filipino Olympic Athletes, Fun Facts About (Part 1)

The Olympic fever is throbbing on my fingertips right now, so on to the list. Many sports-related facts courtesy of The Olympic Movement in the Philippines (Hiyas Press, 2003) by Celso Limjuco Dayrit.

• The Philippines first participated in the Olympics in 1924, or 4 years after Tug-of-War was last accredited as an Olympic sport. The Philippines had sent one representative to the Paris Olympiad, the sprinter David Nepomuceno, who ran the 100 meter dash in 10.8 seconds. To provide perspective on this feat: in the 1988 Seoul Olympiad, Ben Johnson (the Canadian sprinter, not the Elizabethan playwright) ran the 100 meters in 9.79 seconds, or only 1 second faster from Mr. Nepomuceno. And Mr. Johnson of course was a cheater.


• Eleven years before the Philippines deigned to join the Olympics, Manila played host to the largest international sporting event up to that point in human history, the 1913 Far Eastern Games. It featured the best athletes from the three countries comprising the Far East -- the Philippines, China and Japan. In size and number of participants, the 1913 Games exceeded the 1912 Stockholm Olympiad. The country that dominated the 1913 Games was that athletic dynamo, The Philippines. Our nation was led by sprinter Fortunato Catalon, discusser Regino Ylanan, and runner Pedro Ablan, still household names in their respective households.


• Just one year before David Nepomuceno made Philippine history in the Paris Olympiad, the 1923 Far Eastern Games had Filipino basketball player Lou Salvador score 116 points in a single game. The performance still stands today as the most individual points scored in a single game in international competition. Salvador later became a bodabil impresario who introduced to the world such talents as Canuplin, Pepe Pimentel, and Kuya German Moreno. He also grandfathered Philip Salvador.


• If we had sense and invested in football early on, then Paulino Alcantara (1896-1964) may have led us to glory in that sport. Eight decades before the Younghusbands emerged on the local footballing scene, Iloilo-born Spanish-Filipino mestizo Paulino Alcantara was dominating Spanish football as the star of FC Barcelona (pre-La Liga). He remains the all-time goalscorer of that historic club, scoring 357 goals in 357 matches (wow). He did play for the Philippines in the 1917 Far Eastern Games, leading us to victory in the gold medal game, 15-2, against Japan. By any measure, he is one of top five greatest Filipino athletes of all time. But almost no Filipino knows who the hell is Paulino Alcantara. (YouTube tributes with way-old footage here, here and here)
  
  
  


• The Philippines won its first ever Olympic medal, a bronze, in the 1928 Amsterdam Games. The winning medalist was the "Ilocano Shark" Teofilo Yldefonso (1902-1942), who placed third in the 200m breaststroke. He would win another bronze in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and die in the Japanese concentration camp at Capas, Tarlac. According to The Comfort Rooms, Yldefonso is the grandfather of the present-day swimmer Daniel Coakley, one of our 2008 Olympians.
  


• The 1932 Los Angeles Olympiad saw the Philippines garner an unprecedented and unsurpassed record haul of three medals (all bronzes). Apart from Yldefonso, the other Filipino medalists were bantamweight boxer Jose "Cely" Villanueva (b. 1913; Wikipedia does not report a date of death, so he's 95 if still alive) and high jumper Simeon Toribio (1905-1969). It is reported that Toribio could have won the gold medal, but he failed to clear the final bar because he needed to pee. Toribio later became a Congressman from Bohol, leaving office in 1953 to be succeeded by the inimitable Bartolome Cabangbang, leader of the self-explanatory Statehood USA movement.


• Miguel White (1909-1942) of Albay won the bronze medal in the 400m hurdles in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The '36 Olympics -- the Führer's attempt to show the world Nazi Germany as Hitlerrific -- are still the most controversial Games of all time (do make an effort though to catch Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia). Hitler's belief in Aryan supremacy was embarrassed by the phenomenal performance of the African-American track star Jesse Owens, so I wonder if Mr. Hitler would have taken comfort in the decent enough finish of a White, albeit a White from Albay. Sadly, Miguel White, like Yldefonso, was a casualty of World War II, proof that Japan did not take well all that losing at the Far Eastern Games.


• The 1936 Games also saw the first Olympic appearance of Martin Gison (b. 1913). His remarkable Olympic career spanned 28 years. After Berlin, he saw action in the 1948 London Games, the 1952 Helsinki Games, the 1956 Melbourne Games, the 1960 Rome Games, and, at the age of 50, at the 1964 Tokyo Games. Granted, his sport was shooting, where in theory, you could be wheelchair-bound and still participate. Still, he got to fire his guns in six different countries, and how many Filipinos can brag about that.

Don't miss Part 2 coming soon. How did our Filipino Olympic athletes withstand the rise of The Iron Curtain, The Beatles, and the exercise-fascism of Yoyoy Villame? And who is Mona Sulaiman?