There was a point during the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan when sports fans began railing against athletes who missed their opportunities to score medals for the Philippines.
The noise became loud enough that it prompted a reaction from national boxer Nesthy Petecio, who reasoned that there was no reason to bash non-medal athletes, who are even more disappointed by the result.
It also spurred several more opinions from other athletes, who used their social media clout to defend their fellow sports heroes.
The generated noise is proof of something positive: Filipinos have come to expect more from themselves in international arenas.
There was a time, it should be noted, that we were generous with participation praise in big events such as the Asian Games, World Championships, and the Olympics.
Not anymore.
We are, without doubt, in the golden age of Philippine sports-an era where we have not only ended our Olympic dry run but, in a span of three years, won three gold medals in two editions of the celebrated Summer Games.
Olympic triumph
We have a Filipinas football team that qualified to the World Cup-twice. The program has a World Cup win chalked up, too. EJ Obiena is the best pole vaulter in all of Asia, and the greatest track and field star the country has ever had, rising at one point to No. 2 in the world.
Carlos Yulo, owner of two of those Olympic golds, deserves a monument. So does Hidilyn Diaz, who opened the door to Philippine Olympic triumph.
And then there’s Alex Eala, the country’s fast-rising tennis GOAT who is arguably the most popular women’s tennis player in the world right now.
It is the heroics of these athletes that give us the ability to sneer at defeats in events that we feel we shouldn’t have lost.
But all that bristling can be distracting, too.
And in the Asian Games, where we long to protect and extend this period of unprecedented success in international sports, we must not only pick up lessons from those defeats.
We should not only search from the rubble of what we deem as results we could have done better in.
To extend this golden run, we should also look at the spaces where we expected victories-and got them.
We are already past building blueprints out of our shortcomings; we can now begin building off replicable success.
What can we learn from the gold medals in pole vault in gymnastics? That building teams around athletes to cater to their physical, mental, and emotional needs produces great results.
That we should find ways to fund scientific training no matter where we are based-Obiena trained abroad, Yulo has started camping out in the country.
Noise from defeats
What do we pick up from our gold in taekwondo? That maybe targeted funding is not the answer to our meager financial resources.
With the Los Angeles Olympics practically just around the corner, the Asian Games has to be dissected in terms of wins and losses and the stewards of the country’s national program must not react in a knee-jerk manner to diagnose and then address what went wrong.
There are defeats, after all, that bear no need for additional scrutiny because they can be remedied at the level of the athlete. There is, for example, no need to overthink Eala’s bronze medal. Being the No. 1 seed in the tournament was never a guarantee for gold.
Even in the Olympics, where the biggest tennis stars gun for their nation’s glory, only one of the last eight singles winners was the event’s top seed.
In Eala’s case, all it takes is to have an opponent playing on fire in the worst moment and you miss out on the target.
And the noise from defeats such as these can distract preparations for future events.
Spotlight on victories
The best way to build is to shine the spotlight on victories that the country collected in the Asiad. What worked? Of the processes that led to gold, or whatever unexpected success we encountered in Japan, what can be scaled to the grassroots so we can build a bigger pool of world conquerors?
What paths to victory are realistically replicable?
Our current run of success coincides with good news from the resources side. A recent court victory awarded the Philippine Sports Commission with billions in terms of sports funding.