Athletes in the provinces

By Cong Corrales

CHEWING the fat with my ex-girlfriend’s uncle over the weekend just gave me a bird’s eye view of how the national government has always treated provincial athletes all these years — from the time of President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos’s Misamis Oriental School of Arts and Trade to President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s University of Science and Technology in Southern Philippines — not much has changed.

Suffice it to say, they’re all full of it with the athletes end up holding a big bag of crap when they fail.

Sometimes, even if they do get the gold for the country, the government may slander your name under the pretext of the war against drugs backed with shoddy intelligence work.

Case in point for this is Olympic weight lifting silver medalist Hidilyn Francisco Diaz. From out of the blue, the Palace included her in their supposed matrix of government destabilizers.

“Please do not link somebody who is busy making sacrifices for everyone, for the Philippines. I am merely doing my best to represent the Philippines in weightlifting,” Diaz posted on her Facebook in May, this year.

The Palace has never issued an apology to Diaz and instead blamed “some media outlets” for getting their haphazard matrix wrong. “There has been a wrong analysis of the diagram by some media outlets,” Palace spokesman Salvador Panel had said in a statement.

Along with Diaz, former volleyball player Gretchen Ho was also enlisted in Malacañang’s “ouster matrix.”

In an interview with media, Ho pointed to a tweet she posted on March 29 as the likely reason why she was included in the matrix.

“But how can you reason with paid trolls and egg heads? It’s warfare online, and we’re getting caught in between. Be smart and discerning, folks. Don’t let the internet fool you,” Ho posted on Twitter.

Ho said a troll commented on her post and it turned out that it was a DDS troll (Read: Duterte Die-hard Supporter).

 “Siyempre ’yung mga DDS, nagalit sa akin kasi akala nila… they misunderstood it, they put in on Facebook, took it out of context saying that I was calling all the Duterte supporters egg heads,” a Rappler report quoted Ho as saying.

As I have always said, social media, like any other medium or platform for public discourse, is garbage in and garbage out. If the content is king then context is queen. Articulating your point on Twitter will always be a challenge since the platform only allows you 280 characters for every post. If you are not creative in your posts then you will just be contributing to the overall dumbing down of an already comprehension-challenged generation.

How do you expect these athletes to be mentally prepared if the government and non-government trolls keep on taunting them on social media platforms? In the case of Diaz, she isn’t only looking to dominate the powerlifting event in the Southeast Asian Games. As early as when she was tagged as an alleged government destabilizer, she has set her sights to the Olympic Games in Tokyo next year.

That’s why I don’t understand this administration’s minions supposed rally cry to “just support our athletes” when they themselves troll these promising sports icons.

After all, has been said and done, do you think these athletes will remain in the collective consciousness of the country? Apart from the very few, the likes of Lydia de Vega and Efren “Bata” Reyes, there are many national athletes in the provinces who are struggling to make ends meet after giving pride to the Republic some odd years ago. Pfft.