WHO among the following is the greatest in the just-ended Rio Olympics? Michael Phelps. Usain Bolt. Simone Biles.
Phelps, the American swimming sensation, won six medals—five of which were gold.
Bolt, Jamaica’s human lightning, swept the sprints and won a third gold in the men’s 4×100 meters.
Biles, the gymnast darling from the US, scooped up four gold medals.
With his six medals in Rio, Phelps jacked up his medal collection to 28 in five Olympiads—the most by any in the modern Olympics. Of his total haul from Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016, 22 were golds.
I can’t imagine someone eclipsing that feat in the next 50 or so years, let alone equaling it.
Already 31, Phelps, who had actually climbed out of retirement only in 2015, couldn’t possibly be around in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Incredibly improbable as he’d be 35 by then.
But then, if Phelps would suddenly show up in Tokyo as to thoroughly stun us—and even proceed to manage snaring a medal of any color in the 32nd Games—God might be accused of playing favorites.
Same with Bolt.
Enough that he had accomplished his treble. Like Phelps, Bolt’s three golds in athletics—a sweep of the century and 200, plus the 4×100—done three straight from Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016, were simply too spectacular enough so that a return in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics would just be unacceptably unbelievable.
OK, OK, again, like Phelps, Bolt might just qualify in Tokyo, for Chrissakes.
But to win again four years from now—as in a la Phelps being victorious, too—would make for a probable cause to indict God.
Already in his mid-30s by 2020, Bolt is simply impossibly capable of still maintaining those winged feet of lightning.
However, in Biles case, it’d be totally different.
Only 19 years old, Biles, with her four gymnastic golds in Rio, looks dangerously capable of surpassing Bolt’s nine gold total in three successive Olympiads.
But the Biles bite should end on Bolt. Biles targeting Phelps’s 28 medal tally total in five Olympiads—22 were gold—will just be that: dream. God, because He is God, chooses. Phelps is His chosen one.
Now, how about Joseph Schooling?
In Singapore, he will be the hero of all time. Not only did Schooling give the island-nation its first Olympic gold medal. He did it by winning swimming’s 200-meter butterfly, beating Phelps no less and preventing Olympics’ greatest ever from scoring a sweep of his six events in his Rio farewell.
But, hey, in her own “little” way, Hidilyn Diaz more than did her country proud, too, by winning a weightlifting silver. It did not only snap a 20-year Olympic medal drought but it also produced as well the Philippines’s third silver in a modest 10-medal harvest since the 1924 Paris Games.
And, much too sudden, all government support now seems to be thrown behind Hidilyn in our thirst for a first-ever Olympic gold. By God’s grace, Hidilyn will only be 29 in Tokyo 2020. Peak age, I must say.
THAT’S IT Bong Go, indisputably President Duterte’s most trusted soldier of all time, will play for Malacañang Kamao in the UNTV Cup. He will be a marked man in a basketball league also featuring Manny Pacquiao suiting up for the Senate Defenders, only because Bong Go is known as Davao’s “Mr. Three-Point Machinegun.” I just hope that Bong will have the time to play, given that the President is constantly on the move. Bong is the President’s redoubtable shadow, in case you still do not know.