LOOK: Olympic gold medalist Hidilyn Diaz and community pantry organizer Ana Patricia Non are the Inquirer's 2021 Filipinos of the Year. | NCorralesINQ READ:
“Five days after winning [in] the Olympics,” Diaz said, she accepted that her life as a Filipino icon had just began.
As stunned, rambling sportswriters at Tokyo International Forum began scrambling to turn a watershed moment in Philippine sports into a somewhat coherent dispatch, everywhere else she was already being assigned fungible titles: Weightlifting queen. Sports heroine. Trailblazer.In interviews, Diaz would touch on her place in history briefly. But what she always doubles down on is the other meaning of the gold medal.
“She deserves it,” Monico Puentevella, the president of the country’s weightlifting federation, told the Inquirer, adding that her feat has forever changed Filipinos’ attitude toward the sport. And the even bigger change is that young children are now hitting weightlifting gyms. That wasn’t the case before.Jaluag was part of the women’s weightlifting team in the 1991 Southeast Asian Games in Manila, which marked the first time the country sent women to compete in the sport in an international event. The women’s team then was filled with athletes culled from different sports; before Jaluag made the national team, she was a middle distance runner for the University of the East.
“I tell them that instead of trying to be like Ate Haidee, why don’t you try to be better than Ate Haidee, to be a better version of themselves and use Ate Haidee as inspiration,” he said. “Changing people’s mindset takes time but it’s a lot easier to influence people using what we’ve accomplished as an example.”
She is one of the rising stars being eyed as Diaz’s heir apparent and is on an accelerated trajectory; last year, she became the concurrent champion of the junior and senior divisions in her weight class. “Look at what we’re going through now,” Diaz said in Filipino, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s truly a difficult time for us but we can make it through this. We can win against this. We just have to control the things we can control and not focus on those that we cannot.”Everyone, Diaz believes, has a gold medal to shoot for. A difficult situation can be someone’s Olympic weightlifting stage.
When Pacquiao was beginning his ascent to the ranks of boxing’s global super elite, he had the likes of Pancho Villa, Gabriel “Flash” Elorde and even Luisito Espinosa to look back on—boxers whose careers touched various levels of global stardom.
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