Student Athlete

One World. One dream.

It’s one of my greatest dreams to be at the Olympics, it is something I really look forward to. I guess I still have to wait. As an athlete, I’m yet to be an Olympic qualifier. As a spectator, I’m yet to earn enough money.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will start this August and since I can’t be there in Beijing to cheer for the Philippine Athletes I’ll instead encourage fellow Filipinos to at least watch our Athletes in their television sets as they compete for our country.

For those of you who do not know that we have Olympians, we have. And I’ll start with my favorite sport, swimming.

I’ll share with you a brief background about Swimming in Olympics. Swimming has been held at every Olympic Games. The early events were usually only conducted in freestyle (crawl) or breaststroke. Backstroke was added as of the 1904 Games. In the 1940s, breaststrokers discovered they could go much faster by bringing both arms overhead together. This was banned in the breaststroke shortly thereafter but became the butterfly stroke, which is now the fourth stroke used in competitive swimming. Women’s swimming was first held at the 1912 Olympics. It has since been conducted at all the Olympics. Men and women compete in an almost identical programme. They have the same number of events but the freestyle distance for women is 800 metres while for men it is 1500 metres.

Now, our swimmers. We have five (5) delegates for this discipline. Miguel Molina, Ryan Arabejo, James Walsh, Daniel Coakley, and Christel Simms.

All of them registered qualifying times to enter the Olympics for their respective event.

Our Athletes invested a lot of time and effort to qualify for the Olympics. And they’ll give it all at the Olympics. Let’s cheer for them!