TOKYO—Nesthy Petecio and Carlo Paalam were two boxers who won with a flourish on Monday, adding weight to the hope that the Philippines’s first Olympic gold medal, or medals, could be won in these pandemic Games.
First atop the ring was Paalam, a gritty 23-year-old from Bukidnon who escaped with a split decision victory over Ireland’s Brendan Irvine at the almost empty Kokugikan Arena.
Some one-and-a-half hours later, it was the 29-year-old world champion Petecio’s turn to earn her second victory in the Games in David-and-Goliath fashion.
Paalam and Petecio stood at least one head shorter that their opponents. But they were unfazed.
To offset his disadvantage, Paalam jumped the gun on the Irishman, building enough points to stave off Brendan’s last-ditch effort to turn the scores around in the third round.
“I’m thankful that I won my first bout,” Paalam said. “Even if it was close, you saw I really gave it whatever I had left in me.”
Petecio, on the other hand, was more than a head shorter at 5-foot-4 than her 5-foot-8 top-seeded foe, but played David in slaying Chinese Taipei’s Yu-Ting Lin also via split decision to go deeper into the women’s featherweight category.
“My coaches told me that I didn’t need to get into her comfort zone, but just to try and get inside her defense,” Petecio said. “It was all about timing and counter-attacking.
“She stuck to the tactics, without overcommitting,” coach Don Abnett said of Petecio, adding the strategy was to play cat-and-mouse, one of several tactics the Philippine coaching staff has concocted for the Olympics.
“The victory gives me so much happiness, but I don’t really know how to feel right now,” added Petecio, who mightily eliminated the favored Taiwanese with Philippine Olympic Committee President Rep. Abraham “Bambol” Tolentino and Philippine Sports Commission Chairman William “Butch” Ramirez fervently cheering for her from the VVIP Box.
“I just feel so lucky to beat her,” she added.
“I just do what my coaches planned and it is working. It’s amazing,” Petecio said. “I’m very happy inside the ring, doing techniques and tactics we trained [for].”
So devastated was the Taiwanese that she had to turn around during media interviews at the Mixed Zone to shed her tears.
Paalam, bronze medalist at the Jakarta 2019 Asian Games, came out smoking from the bout that became a toe-to-toe affair in the last two rounds.
“I poured it all out [in the last two rounds],” he said.
Paalam takes on Algeria’s Mohamed Flissi on Saturday at 10:48 a.m. (Manila time). Flissi was the flyweight winner of the 2017 African Championships in Brazzaville, Congo, and the champion of the 2019 Golden Belt in Bucharest, Romania.
Petecio, meanwhile, returns to the ring on Wednesday at 10 a.m. (Manila time) against Colombia’s Yeni Marcela Arias Castaneda, whose biggest claim to fame was her bronze-medal feat in the 2019 Pan American Games.
Irish Magno on Sunday scored a convincing 5-0 women’s flyweight victory over Kenya’s Christine Ongare and will fight again in the quarterfinals against Thailand’s Jutamas Jitpong, who also advanced to the last 16 following her victory over Algeria’s Roumaysa Boulam, also via a lopsided 5-0 score.
Eumir Felix Marcial drew a first-round bye and will only fight in the men’s middleweight round-of-16 on Thursday against either Algeria’s Younes Nemouchi or Uganda’s Ssemujju.
Asked how confident he is at this stage of the Olympics, Abnett said: “Very.”
Image courtesy of AP