Martial artists Cherry May Regalado and Junna Tsukii dropped two bronze medals to the Philippine coffers, and the men’s basketball team was thrown out of the window by South Korea, Monday in the 18th Asian Games.
Cherry May Regalado and Junna Tsukii clinched third-place finishes in pencak silat and karatedo, respectively, to raise the country’s bronze medal haul to 12 and prove Filipino female athletes could deliver better than the males in the Games that entered its second week, with China looking unreachable from atop the medal standings.
Regalado shook off the stigma of a medal-less campaign in last year’s Malaysia Southeast Asian Games by scoring 444 points in women’s seri singles, a mere one point off Singapore’s Nurzuhairah Mohammad Yazid (445), who clinched silver.
Indonesia’s Puspa Arumsasi won the gold with 467 points in the sport played at the Padepokan Pencak Silat TM III Hall.
Tsukii, on the other hand, exacted revenge over Paweena Raksachart of Thailand in women’s Kumite -50 kgs of karatedo at the Jakarta Convention Center.
The 27-year-old Filipino-Japanese Tsukii scored four yukos as against one by Raksachart in the two-minute match, to claim her first Asian Games medal and the 12th for the Philippine delegation with six more days of competition.
“She defeated me last year in the SEA Games, so I wanted revenge,” Tsukii said.
Photo from asiangames2018.id
Regalado missed the podium at last year’s Kuala Lumpur SEA Games in the same event, a loss that she admitted had been a bitter pill to swallow.
But instead of sulking, she got herself back in harness.
“Hindi ko napigilan ang pag-iyak noon sa SEA Games kasi po alam ko na makaka-medal ako,” the 23-year-old Nutrition graduate at the Aklan State University in Banga said.
Overall, 11 out of the 15 medals of the Philippines came from the daughters of the country – three of which shine the brightest.
