National athletes from Baguio and the rest of the country are eagerly awaiting for Monday as the fate of the delayed 2021 Southeast Asian Games.
“We are still training on our own,” said wushu sanda player Divine Wally.
Wushu taolu player Daniel Parantac said that they will know by either November or December.
This after Philippine Olympic Committee president Abraham Tolentino said this week that everything will be finalized with the SEA Games Federation will still decide the staging of the biennial event when they meet on Monday.
Tolentino also said that host Hanoi is inclined in the staging of the 11-nation sports meet and might be held on the second to third week of May next year.
“I have no words yet from our NSA (national sports association – the Philippine Wushu Federation) when we start our official training and where all of us national athletes will be together,” said the mother of an eight month old baby.
“As of now, we doing self-training and being monitored by our head coach (Samson Co),” the 2019 SEAG gold medalist told this writer.
Gideon Fred Padua is the other wushu sanda player from Baguio. He won a silver in the 2019 SEAG.
“We still have not heard from our NSA. We just hope that it will be this November or December that we get an update,” added Parantac, who leads the trainings of elderlies at the Rose garden also.
“There is nothing definite yet,” said kurash national team member Estie Gay Liwanen, referring to their trainings which is expected to be staged here.
She said that they submitted a new schedule and budget for the staging of a bubble training here with the Philippine Sports Commission after their supposed training last July did not push through with the postponement of the SEAG in Vietnam due to the surge in Covid cases.
The University of Baguio alum and winner of SEAG gold in 2019 said a training in Japan is eyed but it could be next year after the bubble training here.
Liwanen is still in manila and will come up to Baguio on Sunday in time for the launching of the Heroes: Wall of Fame mural project on Tuesday that includes her in the 32 that will be painted on.
Wally is still in Aritao, Nueva Viscaya where she now lived with hubby Benjie Rivera, who is one of the 32 athletes to be enshrined in the Wall of Fame after his 2008 bronze medal finish in the Beijing Olympics in wushu sanda.
Rivera is one of the more successful wushu sanda athletes in the city from the University of the Cordilleras.
Parantac, meanwhile, is on home quarantine after being contact traced for Covid-19. He will be one of the 32 athletes to be painted on the athletic walls starting October 20.
As this developed, two long time members of the SEAG will not parade their respective flags in the 34th staging of the biennial meet.
Indonesia and Thailand are barred from waiving their flags for being non-compliant of the anti-doping rules by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Tolentino, however, said that the athletes from said nation-members can still compete but will not wear their flags like what happened to the Russians, who carried the International Olympic Committee (IOC) flag when they competed in the Tokyo Olympics last August.
“I think they (Thailand and Indonesia) can still play but cannot carry flag. Like Russia in Tokyo Olympics, and they have a pending appeal,” Tolentino was quoted as saying in a national paper.
Thailand, Indonesia and North Korea were declared non-compliant by WADA. This makes them ineligible to host regional, continental or world championships for a year.
Due to this, the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games (AIMAG) set in Bangkok and Chonburi in Thailand, where the Philippines is scheduled to participate, will be postponed from next year to 2023.
