THAILAND obviously won’t settle for nothing less than the overall championship when it hosts the 33rd Southeast Asian Games next month.
Thus, Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) president Abraham ‘Bambol’ Tolentino tempered down expectations for the 1600-athlete strong Philippine contingent to the December 9 to 20 50-sport games the Thais are hosting in Bangkok, Chonburi and Sonkhla.
‘It’s extremely hard to make an assessment right now because host Thailand has already excluded all the events where we are strong at,’ Tolentino told reporters during a Media Briefing for the SEA Games on Monday at the Milkway Café Restaurant in Makati City.
‘I’m hoping that at least we match our last SEA Games performance,’ he said.
The Philippines ranked fifth overall with 58 gold, 85 silver and 117 bronze medals two years ago with Vietnam ruling the medals race with a 136-105-114 gold-silver-bronze tally followed by Thailand with 108-96-108, Indonesia at 87-80-109 and host Cambodia with 81-74-127.
‘If we can match our overall placing the last time, that’s enough already,’ Tolentino said. ‘There are no events for Carlos Yulo [who opted to skip the games], while the weight classes of some of our medalists in martial arts were removed.’
‘It’s an uphill battle, but we’ll try our best,’ he said. ‘No promises, but surprises.’
The Philippines emerged overall champion when it hosted the games in 2005 and most recently in 2019.
Thailand is a five-time overall champion but last won the prestigious title in 2013 in Myanmar and is dead set at dominating the 574 events it has programmed this year.
Tolentino believes Asia’s No. 1 pole vaulter EJ Obiena, the boxers and Gilas Pilipinas will surely deliver gold medals.
‘We look at the other sports where we have many entries like boxing-[Tokyo Olympics bronze medalist] Eumir Felix Marcial and Weljon Mindoro,’ he said.
Both are already in the pros but heeded the call to fight in Thailand.
Thailand is spending 2.05 billion Thai baht (roughly P3.7 billion) for hosting the games and pegged participation from the 11 countries at 12,506 athletes, the largest in SEA Games history-the hosts are fielding 1,807 athletes, Malaysia 1,580, Indonesia 1,548 and Cambodia 1,515, a report from the thesoutheastasiadesk.com stated.
Besides Olympic and traditional or endemic sports, the Thais included demonstration and value-added sports-flying disc, disc golf, air sports (paragliding and powered paragliding) and 8-a-side tug of war.