PALEMBANG - The Philippine Men's Dragon Boat national team finished fifth overall in the men's Canoe TBR (Traditional Boat Race) 200m event on Saturday to begin their 2018 Asian Games campaign at the Jakabaring Lake in Palembang.
The Philippines clocked in with a time of 53.58 seconds just behind Indonesia who came in at fourth, and medal winners Thailand, Chinese Taipei, and China. The Philippines' women's team meanwhile finished eighth overall.
"At least I'm proud that we made it into the finals out of 11 [teams], and they were ranked fifth," said coach Leonara Escollante about the performance of her team. "This is our first time that we joined the dragon boat in the Asian Games."
The men's finals had a peculiar beginning with officials calling a false start on hosts Indonesia. All six countries had to go back to the starting line for a restart after already a handful of seconds into the race. For team captain Hermie Macaranas, he was disappointed with the false start.
"For us, we're so ready once we're inside the boat. We're always at 100 percent when we start," Macaranas said in Filipino. "We didn't expect to have a false start. We had a big problem because we were already focused at the start."
Indonesia was not penalized for its false start as only the team who commits a second violation will be disqualified. The false start was certainly unfortunate but Coach Escollante wasn't overly concerned with the incident. Instead, she was more distraught with how all teams had to use a different kind of boat than to what they were accustomed to. Because they had a limited time to adjust and prepare with the new equipment, she assessed that it led to their subpar performance.
Both the men's and the women's actually had poor outings in their respective qualification races. And because their finish times were not at par with the rest of the field, two Philippine squads had to go through repechage, a separate round for those who didn't meet the qualifiers. The men's and the women's teams did not let their second chance go to waste in the wild card phase as they both barged into the semifinals.
However, only the men's team made it into the final round. The women's team finished with a time of 59.21 seconds in the semis, forcing them to miss out the finals and into a classification round. They managed to place second in the tail race, to end up eighth out of 11 teams.
After the first day, the Philippine team remains confident that they can perform better in the other events in the coming days.
"We're still set on our goal that we've been longing for so long because we worked so hard," said a determined Macaranas, who happened to celebrate his 23rd birthday competing in his first Asian Games. "We won't accept that we'll go home empty-handed. We're going to give everything that we can."