Reality of why the Philippines is nowhere near a medal as of now

 

I really really hope this is my last Olympics rant. We will just do this all again in 2012. Or until I see something I strongly disagree with, which happens about every five minutes.

Something about my job. One of my functions is to teach our new employees , some fresh out of college how to comprehend our service process. To help me do that I resort to real life and examples they can relate to. I use fast food and I use basketball and relate the realities there to the realities of our Service process and even our revenue stream.

I will attempt to do that and explain why the Philippines is not world class in terms of Olympic competition.

Let's take your typical production facility of world class items. Top of the line products. It can be coffee, it can be shoes or it can be luxury cars. The end product has to surpass or be in the top 3 of anything else like it in the world.

Before anything happens there has to be a world class design (plan). In that plan you foresee the practical application of the following things.

 

 

1) Raw Materials - for a world class product not just anything has to do , you need quality material to start with. Sometimes quality can only be achieved by going through numbers. Like eliminating about 99.99 % of what you have access to. Whether it's coffee beans or leather for the shoes, you just have to have good stuff to start with. Bringing in huge quantities gives you the luxury of being choosy.

2) You have to have an elite production/ refinement process- To be the best in the world , raw material is not enough, but what you do with it is part of the equation. Look at what goes into the production of a BMW or a Rolls Royce or a Bentley.

Olympic medalists are not that much different except when humans are involved, what gets them through the weeding out process is motivation and desire. You can't make the same case for coffee beans.

Part of the motivation of being good at something is the prestige that comes with being the best . Like I have said many times before this society only values basketball in terms of a competitive event. Even with something we value we don't do well internationally. What more with events we do not value??? And these are events that are only relevant once every few years. The Filipino sports psyche is fascinating if you examine the PBA. There are three chances a year to be "champions". This lends itself to instant gratification. There is no big off season wait for the finality to sink in. When raised with that mentality, hard to imagine a lot of people training 4 plus years for one event.

I asked  my long time sports buddy from the old Philippine Stock Exchange Alan Araullo (Regina Capital) and asked him if anybody even questioned that one third of the PBA's 10 teams was owned by one conglomerate. His answer was in the negative. With that kind of non critical eye towards competition in the one pro league in the only team sport that matters in this country no wonder we don't go anywhere . In a world of game fixing, gambling and conclusion in sport , having one third of a league owned by the same group should at least be questioned but it is not. I suspect that the powers that be such as they are feel they are lucky to have that kind of sponsorship and should that go away it will start a domino effect that may see the PBA enter an era of chaos.

Seinfeld once said that sports fans essentially cheer for laundry since players in the age of free agency move from one team to another with no roots. But at least the "laundry" is rooted in one place with essentially the same set of fans for half their games. In the PBA , there is no sense of geography to base your loyalties on but the sponsors themselves. Well that works for this league. Not only are you not cheering for laundry but for commercials. Weird if you think about it.

 No such thing as a home team . The market has to have some other way of determining loyalty since the teams are basically just advertising . Imagine race car drivers like Juan Montoya or Jeff Gordon have ads all over themselves and their cars. In the PBA the ads happen to be worn by humans. Yes folks, reality.

When you have access to a lot of talented athletes all wanting the same thing, you will likely end up with an elite 1% . This 1% all started out coming out of an ultra competitive region then the best of the region got to compete nationally which is another pressure cooker.

So essentially I just want to explore the roots of sports and consciousness in this country and why it leads to such a sense of entitlement despite no competitive world class development program. Despite very few serious athletes that embrace sports that don't have a hoop ten feet off the ground.

 

OK, so now I described a real production process and I generalized what goes into producing an elite athlete. Do you really think the Philippines can be in the top 3 of any Olympic event against the best of the rest of the world? Can our pressure cooker process in any event compete with even the Top 20? The way I see it, we don't have the numbers or desire to compete in a lot of these events. But we sure as hell want the glory and attention that comes with winning. No wonder this society is as corrupt as it is. Our society has proved it  only knows and cares about basketball. Our society does not motivate the numbers to excel in anything athletic outside of basketball. Then every four years they complain about no medals.You probably heard this saying 7843 times: "You will reap what you sow". Why is everybody in this country so surprised at our reaping ( or lack of it) when we really don't do any sowing??

 

Ed