It wasn’t nearly as lopsided as the final score would seem to indicate. The Spaniards fought gallantly, and kept apace of the Americans with every basket and rebound, and the game went down the wire. This wasn’t a replay of the earlier blowout suffered by Spain in the hands of the U.S. during the eliminations. The Americans reached the finals with a 7-0 card and won by an average of 30 points. This was supposed to be a walk in the park. It wasn’t.

It was a two-point game early in the fourth quarter with a Pau Gasol dunk from an alley-oop and a Rudy Fernandez 3-pointer. The Gasol Brothers played like men possessed, and it looked as if the score would be close in the final minutes. It was.

The U.S. lead was only six with 1:44 left. Spain was within striking distance. It was finally Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol’s L.A. teammate, who put the game away with a drive and two free throws in the closing minute. The game was a classic.

The Americans’ sloppy defense almost let the gold slip away. They were overconfident, and the Spanish strategy was to stay close throughout and finish strong. Coach K looked relieved at the final buzzer. Dwayne Wade topscored with 27, while Kobe added 20.

For a quarter-by-quarter account, check out the NYT: BASKETBALL GOLD: U.S. 118, Spain 107

Rising Spanish 17-year old superstar Ricky Rubio, who created the biggest basketball buzz at these Olympics, was hardly a factor.

Is the Spanish basketball team racist ? The Guardian reports on its eye-catching faux pax.
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But now that I have your attention, let me get to the point of this post, which is to jump right into the inevitable finger-pointing bandwagon on our dismal showing in the Beijing Olympics. Not that medal shutouts are anything new to us. The country has failed to win a single medal in any of the past three Olympics (Sydney, Athens and now Beijing).

And with Mongolia winning its first gold at the 2008 Olympics (in judo), the Philippines now holds the dubious record for the most medals without a gold. Even war-torn Afghanistan managed to break into the medal tally.

It’s clearly not the fault our athletes, who have exhibited intense dedication and heart in going up against the world’s best. Neither is it ability, as we have shown talent aplenty in many athletic fields and endeavors, and continue to do so. And we have almost, almost, managed to crash into the Olympic gold medal column a number of times.

Neither is it genetics. Granted, there might be bases for the theory that some countries and/or peoples are physiologically or even culturally predisposed to excel in certain sports. The Kenyans in long-distance running, for example, or the Jamaicans in the sprint events, or the heavy-set Mongolians in grappling contests, like wrestling and judo. But by this reasoning, Pinoys have proven themselves to be masterful in sports where raw power is less a factor than speed, agility and cunning, like boxing. Yet our lone boxing bet lost in his very first elimination bout.

Nor is it just a matter of scant resources or an inadequate talent pool. Note that countries smaller, poorer or more politically-unstable than the Philippines, like Mongolia and war-ravaged Afghanistan, had no problem grabbing medals. Or in the case of Jamaica, a whole clutch of gold medallions.

It’s simple. Our failure to show is plainly a consequence of the corruption and blatant politicking so prevalent in all of our undertakings.

If only a fraction of the hundreds of millions lost to crooked deals, like the fertilizer fund scam, were given over for the training and sustenance of our athletes, they wouldn’t have to literally go begging for funds just to survive. They have to rely on the kindness of strangers and corporate sponsors just to get the proper gear and requisite international exposure. A fortunate few are well off enough to finance themselves. None but token help would be forthcoming from the government, which only promises a slew of rewards come competition time as a show of so-called “support”.

It’s been the same old story for so many decades. Our fractious national sports associations (NSAs) are less vehicles for the advancement of games and their athletes than platforms for political and financial aggrandizement. Scandal and strife are rampant. Even in basketball, which we can never even hope to dominate in a million years (even if we compete in Asia only), there are two competing NSAs, the Basketball Association of the Philippines (BAP) and the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP). Talk about a house divided.

And maybe a sense of national commitment and pride is also lacking in us. It’s doesn’t appear to be a matter of national shame that we laid a big fat egg in Beijing. If we don’t give a shit, then we probably don’t deserve the gold.

So the title of this post doesn’t seem to be so far-fetched after all. At least Manny Pacquiao has proven himself to be truly world-class. He’s street smart and savvy and, from all indications, seems to be a true patriot. And he can’t possibly do any worse than what our supposed sports leaders have already done so far. Which is lead us nowhere.

And if you think I’m being overly pessimistic, check out the Wiki page and website of the Philippine Sports Commission, which is the government agency tasked to develop sports in the country. There’s literally nothing of substance there. Not a damn thing.

William “Butch” Ramirez, chair of the Philippine Sports Commission, calls for everyone to step down—including himself— who may be responsible for the sorry state of Philippine sports, specially the heads of NSAs. It’s about time. Too late to do us any good as far as this Olympics is concerned though.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is “not happy” with the country’s Olympic medal shutout in Beijing. As if she, and her inept minions, are not largely responsible for the whole mess in the first place.

Zero for us, while our neighbors bring home a bunch of medals.
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But misfortune also takes mere seconds to unfold. Behind the glitter and hoopla of the “greatest show on earth”, are tragedies which occur without warning, changing people’s lives forever. American tourist Todd Bachman, father of former UCLA All-American and 2004 volleyball Olympian Elisabeth “Wiz” Bachman McCutcheon, was killed while sightseeing in Beijing by a 47-year-old, knife-wielding Chinese assailant, who later committed suicide by leaping 130 feet from a balcony on the 13th-century Drum Tower, located 5 miles from the Olympic Games site. His wife was gravely injured, although Elisabeth was unharmed.

Surely one of the more poignant tales behind the Olympics is that of Chinese dancer Liu Yan, who was seriously injured during a rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games just days before the show, and faces the prospect of being paralyzed for the rest of her life. Considered one of the country’s top classical Chinese dancers, Liu Yan, a graduate of the prestigious Beijing Dance Academy, was preparing for the performance of a lifetime: the only solo dance in a four-hour spectacular that was expected to be seen by a global audience of more than one billion people. During a rehearsal, she leaped toward a moving platform that malfunctioned and plunged about 10 feet into a shaft, landing on her back and breaking her spine.

According to the New York Times, her head was not badly injured, and she can move her arms. But she has no feeling below her chest, she said in a hospital bed interview. She cannot move her lower body, including her legs. Doctors have told her family it is unlikely she will ever walk again. During an interview in her hospital room, Liu was teary-eyed and said she was in disbelief about the accident.“I never imagined I could suffer such a tragedy,” she said. For a professional dancer, this seems a particularly cruel fate.

Organizers of the opening ceremony initially asked witnesses and friends not to disclose the accident ahead of the Olympic Games opening on August 8. Chinese authorities also sought to downplay the incident. For the most part, the state-run news media have not reported the accident, although the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official organ, mentioned it in a small article. Initial reports said Liu had missed a step and was slightly injured, and afterward all news of the accident disappeared.

Persistent inquries from Western media outfits, as well as stories circulating in the internet, forced the Olympic organizers to later admit to the incident. Now the Chinese media is full of weepy reports of bedside visits by Chinese officials, who now hail her as a heroine.

Buddhist teachings talk about “little deaths”, suggesting that every experience of change that we have is but a facet of the greatest of all transformative experiences – death. Even in the Beijing Olympics, death and grievous loss have managed to play a role, as backdrops for triumphs of the human spirit.

You Tube snippets of dances performed by Liu Yan.

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Read also: Typhoon Frank, the MV Princess of the Stars Tragedy and the Culture of Disaster

My good fortune was compounded when I found this video in the Far East Economic Review’s Travellers’ Tales while surfing. In the run-off to the Beijing Olympics in August, the Chinese have set new standards for taste and class in promoting the games, this time involving around 1,200 girls forming the iconic Olympic rings.

Something to brighten up an otherwise gray day. Such is life.

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Last week, protests in Tibet turned violent as Chinese security forces clashed with hundreds of Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans protesting continued Chinese rule. According to the Tibetan protestors, at least 80, and perhaps many more, people were killed; Chinese authorities placed the official death toll at 10. Rioting has spread to neighboring provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, and has mobilized sympathizers internationally.

The protests began March 10, the anniversary of a failed 1959 Tibetan uprising. The People’s Republic of China took Tibet by force in 1951, and has implemented a policy of resettlement of Han Chinese from the east, who now far outnumber ethnic Tibetans.

At the center of the conflict: Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. China called for an international investigation of the Dalai Lama, accusing him of masterminding the violent Tibetan protests spreading across China. Beijing’s position was summarized as “Tibet has long been part of China, that Tibet has benefited from modernization, and that the Dalai Lama should not be allowed to return because he aims to split Tibet from China.”

The Tibetan religious leader denied the Chinese claims and emphasized his life-long commitment to non-violent means to effect political change. He called the violence “suicidal” for the Tibetan push for political autonomy and threatened to resign his political post as leader of Tibet’s government in exile “if things become out of control.”

The unrest, by design, comes at a time when Beijing is moving heaven and earth to improve its dismal human rights record, part of the window-dressing for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Thus, the Beijing Olympics organizing committee is sticking to its plans to take the Olympic torch to Tibet and Mount Everest, despite the probability of the protests escalating as the games near.

However, world opinion appears to be on the side of of the beleaguered Tibetans. The French foreign minister and the president of the European Parliament raised the possibility of boycotting the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in August, although not the actual games. This will spoil Beijing’s elaborately planned coming out party.

But the genie is out of the bottle. There are an estimated 100 million Buddhists in China alone, huge numbers even by Chinese standards. Although they may not all belong to the branch of Tibetan Buddhism headed by the Dalai Lama, they all lay claim to a kinship dating back 2,500 years when Prince Siddhartha gained enlightenment under the bodhi tree in the village of Bodh Gaya in northern India.

And its not primarily a matter of religion, as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal argues. While there may be similarities between the suppression of the Falun Gong movement as a threat to the Communist party, it goes deeper than that.

The struggle of the Tibetan people is one between a colonizing power and a subjugated race. Consider the daily realities of life in Tibet as described by journalist Howard W. French:

Tibetans live in closer proximity than ever with the Han, who have flooded in with a wave of state-driven investment. But they occupy separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear.
There is no legalized ethnic discrimination in China, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.

In the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Han shopkeepers, hostel owners and others who are picking up the pieces of their lives after riots that destroyed many Chinese-owned business there spoke with scarcely concealed condescension, and often with outright hostility, of Tibetans whom they described as lazy and ungrateful for the economic development they have brought.

“Our government has wasted our money in helping those white-eyed wolves,” Wang Zhongyong, a Han manager of handicraft shops, said in an interview in Lhasa.
Among Han in Lhasa, comments like these stood out for their mildness.

“The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable,” said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver, in an interview. “We don’t have a good impression of them, as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable.
Even among long-term residents in Lhasa, Han Chinese said they had no Tibetan friends and confessed that they tended to avoid interaction with Tibetans as much as possible. “There’s been this hatred for a long time,” said Tang Xuejun, a Han resident of Lhasa for the last 10 years. “Sometimes you would even wonder how we had avoided open confrontation for so many years. This is a hatred that cannot be solved by arresting a few people.” Tibetans, meanwhile, complain that they have been relegated to second-class citizenship, that their culture is being destroyed through forced assimilation, that their religious freedoms have been trampled upon.

We therefore share the experience of the Tibetans as a people who have worn the yoke of foreign domination. The oppression, repression, contempt and abuse brought upon the people of Tibet mirror the same attitudes borne against us by our Spanish, American and Japanese colonial masters.

Buddhism has thus become a source of enlightenment and change, not just for individuals but for society as a whole. This adds a whole other dimension to the concept of Buddhism as a liberating force. Put in starkly simple terms by the Venerable Thubten Chodron, an American Tibetan Buddhist nun, in her book “Open Heart, Clear Mind”:

The first principal realization of the path (to enlightenment through the four noble truths)is the determination to be free from all problems and dissatisfaction. This arises from recognizing that or present situation isn’t completely satisfactory and that’s we’re capable of experiencing greater happiness. Thus, we’ll determine to free ourselves from a bad situation and aim for a better one.

The obvious danger is that once the Tibetan protest movement evolves into a war of national liberation, violence will be inevitable.

Already the younger and more aggressive generation of Tibetans consider the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” a road to failure.

Years of simmering resentment over Beijing’s heavy-handed rule led to recent riots.

Report from the city of Chengdu, the gateway to the remote Tibetan plateau, now the edge of the battle zone.

The Dalai Lama speaks of the violence in Tibet and how he keeps himself serene and focused despite the continuing turmoil.

China makes Olympic security a priority amid allegations that Tibetans are planning violent attacks in their quest for increased autonomy.

Beijing has said “no force” can stop the Olympic flame relay, as it faces violent protests in key cities along its route.
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