Archery coach Jennifer Chan bit her nails as she tried to steal glances at the high-powered gallery at the Beijing Green Archery Field on Saturday afternoon.
Worried that her ward might lose concentration, she did not tell Mark Javier that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her big entourage were in the stands.
Javier, battling through the effects of diarrhea, kept his focus and easily made the middle half of the men's Fita 70-meter ranking round, setting a new Philippine record along the way.
After the 72-arrow round, Javier ranked 37th in the field of 64 archers, earning him a knockout duel with a relatively lightweight Kuo Cheng-wei of Chinese Taipei. More important, the Filipino surpassed his old record by two points with 654 on the strength of a 333 in the second 36-arrow half.
Javier, it turned out, knew that Arroyo was watching him. Interestingly, though, the wiry, 26-year-old archer from Dumaguete focused more on unfinished business.
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The first of the Philippines’ seven aquatics bidders joins the fray at the awe-inspiring Water Cube Tuesday when balik-Olympian James Walsh competes in the heats of the men’s 200-meter butterfly looking to better the national record.
But it’s female lifter Hidilyn Diaz who will open the RP bid on the third day of the Beijing Olympics here as she gets her baptism of fire in the 58-kilogram class.
Diaz, the 17-year-old Zamboanga lass who made these Games as a wild card, sees action at 3:30 p.m. at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Aerospace gymnasium against a stellar field that includes Chinese world record-holder Chan Yanqing.
Diaz and Walsh are the only Filipino athletes vying for either a medal or qualification Tuesday.
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Admittedly overwhelmed by top-notch competition, shotgun marksman Eric Ang wound up dead last in the tough trap qualification stage Sunday and became the first Filipino to bow out of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad here.
The 37-year-old Olympic first-timer shot dismal strings of 21 and 20 on the second day of the event for a total of 106, missing the sixth and final shoot-off berth by 13 birds.
Altogether, he went off target 19 times in the 125-bird preliminary stage.
Completely unable to climb out of the hole he dug for himself with a first-string 19 birds Saturday, the LPG distributor from Laoag City shared the basement in the 35-shooter field with Spain’s Alberto Fernandez and Bolivia’s Cesar David Menacho-Flores.
On the same day archer Mark Javier settled for 36th spot in the ranking round of the men’s FITA 70-meter event, Ang followed that tragic 19 with 24 and 22 and ranked next to last after the first three strings.
Javier and Ang were the only Filipinos from a lean squad of 15 to see action so far in the 20-day, 205-nation Olympics.
Javier, the Asian Championships gold medalist, resumes his quest on Wednesday when he battles Chinese Taipei’s Kuo Cheng-wei in one of 32 knockout matches at the Beijing Green Archery Field west of this smog-choked city.
The 5-foot-5 Silliman University alumnus needs five wins in the head-to-head matches to assure himself of the bronze medal.
Inexperience told heavily on Ang at the soggy, mist-shrouded Beijing Shooting Range north of the city as he groped for the form that gave him an impressive seventh-place finish at the World Cup in Suhl, Germany, early this year.
After letting go four clays in the fourth string, he completely wilted at the last, missing the fifth, ninth, 19th, 20th and 24th birds in the rain.
Ranked according to the last string, the Filipino came in last, seven rungs below the only other Southeast Asian in the six-squad field, Singaporean Lee Wung Yew who managed 110.
Ang turned in a performance that even failed to beat the gold-winning effort of 107 at the Thailand SEA Games last December.
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He may have brought up the rear in his first Olympic foray but Eric Ang never fired blanks, metaphorically.
The Philippines’ lone shooting entry in the Games of the 29th Olympiad here emerged from the smoke of battle dead last, in a tie with two others, and shell-shocked after competing shoulder to shoulder with the world’s finest trap shooters.
But the chance to shoot with the best of them was something Ang said he’d always pine for as long as he doesn’t get tired cleaning his double-barreled Beretta DT10 shotgun.
The soft-spoken trap wild card noted that 75 percent of the competition in shooting’s first outdoor event had Olympics experience.
The 5-foot-4 Ang said there was no excuse of the technical sort for his poor form, but conceded he should have shot better after range minders placed leather mats on the firing bays. He said he was used to the bare, slightly slippery surface during the pre-competition.
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Source: Inquirer
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