De Quiros on the SEA Games and Arroyo

Philippine officials themselves have assured everything is on the up and up -- the judges are not Filipinos anyway, they come from other countries. And local sports commentators have argued that host countries in events like this tend to do well, their athletes exceeding themselves because the home crowd is behind them. Whether that is enough to offset the country’s slide in international sports -- we’ve been slipping down the ladder over the years -- is of course another question entirely. Indeed, not just to arrest the decline but to surge back up to the top at a time of great economic hardship since sports excellence normally follows prosperity. It does tend to raise eyebrows.

A friend of mine suggested in jest that maybe we’re not really cheating, or not just yet, we’re just, as the Commission on Elections and the citizens' election watchdog Namfrel did last year to help push Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, “trending.” The cheating to come later.

Frankly, I don’t know that we are cheating or not. What I do know is that we’re on very shaky ground as far as credibility goes. Between the word of Thaksin and that of Arroyo, it’s not hard to see whom the world community will believe. And there’s the very real and very hard rub.

I’ve always said that our willingness to live a lie, or tolerate a president who never won, would produce the deepest wounds in our lives, many of them invisible. I did not know that would happen so soon and so conspicuously. As it is, the least of my worries is that we’re getting this bad press abroad over so vital a thing as the SEA Games. Though that is a humongous worry enough in itself. Make no mistake about it: Other countries take sports deathly seriously, and take honesty and fairness even more deathly seriously. The Filipino is already much depreciated abroad. If you’re a woman, you cannot travel to Hong Kong, the Middle East or Europe without someone asking you whose house you’re going to scrub the floors. (To add to the reputation of Filipinos as maids the added one of being likely to run off with their masters’ china or shortchange them with the hours is to flirt with suicide.) I wouldn’t underestimate the impact on overseas work with us getting renown, or notoriety, as a nation of cheats.

But as I said, that is the least of my worries. My biggest one is what all this is doing to us -- to our psychology, to our way of life, to our very concept of ourselves as a people. Because the truly startling thing about all this is the complete absence of outrage on the part of the public about Thaksin’s or his minions’ charge of cheating. The same apathy with which the public has greeted Arroyo’s cheating, and which has allowed her to survive, is the one being shown by the public toward the accusation that the only way this country can now get ahead in any competition with its neighbors is by cheating. And which is killing the country. Either that public doesn’t care, or it finds in it only an inexhaustible source of text-message jokes.

Yan ang nakakalungkot, Conrad. Link to the full article here.

More from Ernie Maceda:

No closure. At first, the 23rd Southeast Asian Games organizing committee thought it had cleared itself when Thai sports officials apologized for accusing the Philippines of cheating.

But the issue has taken another turn for the worse as Surapong Suebwonglee, the Thai government's official spokesman, insisted that based on TV replays, there were “serious problems” with judging in the 23rd SEAG.

In a direct slap, he added Thailand will be a better host suggesting the Philippines has been a bad host. He said: “As the (next) host country, we will be good hosts and guarantee fair play.” This official statement from Secretary Bunye's Thai counterpart certainly requires that GMA conduct a serious probe of the Thai accusations. The 24-hour deadline given to Robert Aventajado passed without a report being released.