PARIS. –Any other coach would be upset seeing his athlete finishing dead last.
This, however, was not true of national para swimming coach Tony Ong, who remained unruffled when veteran para swimmer Ernie Gawilan wound up 11th and last in the men’s 200-meter SM7 heats last Saturday in the 17th Paralympic Games swimming championships.
At the La Defense Arena pool, Gawilan, 33, looked way out of his league and was underwhelming in the heats with a sub-par time of two minutes and 56.39 seconds, with the top eight qualifiers advancing to the finals.
“Ernie had problems in the breaststroke portion, although expected ko na makapasok siya sa finals man lamang,” the coach said.
Ong knew that Gawilan was capable of a better performance, considering his time of 2:50.49 in the event in the Tokyo edition of the quadrennial meet three years ago or his 2:52.82 clocking in last year’s Hangzhou Asian Para Games.
But rather than crying over spilled milk, Ong took a more philosophical approach, noting that Gawilan was using the event as a warmup to his pet event, the 400-meter S7 freestyle, on Monday.
“Hindi naman talaga ito ‘yung event ni Ernie. This is just a tune-up event for him,” the mentor said.
“Sa training namin, talagang pinaghandaan namin ‘yung 400 freestyle. Let’s see how he will do because we expect him to be at his peak on Monday,” Ong said.
This is the same event where he won back-to-back gold medals in last year’s Hangzhou Asian Para Games with a time of 4:58.29, and also in the 2018 edition in Jakarta, Indonesia.
“Maayos ang pakiramdam ko. Bigay todo na ako dito,’’ said Gawilan. A four-time Asian Para Games gold medalist, Gawilan has been bunched with Argentina’s Inaki Basiloff, Ukraine’s Andrii Trusov, Cuba’s Yosjaniel Hernandez Velez and Yurii Shenhur, another Ukranian, in the 400m freestyle.
Basiloff nosed out Trusov for the gold medal in their 200m IM encounter over the weekend.
