With a total of 36 gold, 56 silver and 77 bronze medals, Philippines placed sixth overall at the close of the 26th Southeast Asian Games in Palembang, Indonesia yesterday.

Two years ago in Laos, the Filipinos settled for fifth place, but was overtaken this year by Singapore which had 42-45-73 medal tally with 18 golds medals from swimming.

Host Indonesia took 182 of the 552 gold medals to emerge overall champ but missed the gold in football in a dramatic 4-5 penalty shootout against Malaysia. Indonesia had a total of 151 silver and 152 bronze medals.

Thailand, distant second, with 75 gold medals less than Indonesia, had 100 silver and 120 bronze medals while Vietnam, runner up for about a week, finished third with 96-90-100.

Football champion Malaysia finished in fourth place with 59-50-81 gold-silver-bronze tally.

Rounding out the field are 2013 SEAG host Myanmar (16-27-36), Lao-PDR (9-12-36), Cambodia (4-11-24), Timor Leste (1-1-6) and Brunei Darussalam (0-4-7).

Of the total 39 sports disciplines that competed taekwondo unseated athletics as best quality medal producer with 4-3-5, boxing second with 4-1-1 and billiards/snooker with 3-2-4.

Athletics came up 50 percent short of its projections ending up with only two gold medals and nine silver medals from a combination of veterans and rookies and five bronze medals.

Wushu, wrestling cycling and softball all won two fancied gold medals, a number that officials of the Philippine Olympic Committee had pegged as minimum production of each national sports association for the country to improve its performance in Laos.

Unfortunately, a number of consistent gold medal winners did not deliver.

In spite of the surprise gold medals from newly-included sports of bridge and sport climbing — the other one being paragliding — the Philippines could not approximate its targets as medal-rich swimming, shooting, and gymnastics failed to win a gold medal.

Philippines also did not win any medal from football, petanque, futsal, canoeing, badminton, water polo, which has historically been a silver medal behind Singapore, paragliding and beach volleyball.

The cerebral card game of bridge, where players bid based on points derived from aces, kings, queens and jacks and enter contracts in any of the four suits or no-trump, had also the distinction of producing the country’s best athlete—Francisco Sainz Alquiros.

The 54-year-old Alquiros edged 8-ball and 9-ball billiards queen Iris Ranola with one additional silver in the mixed butler event.

Providing the hope for future international contest outside of silver medalists Eric Panique and Archand Christian Bagsit in track races, is a 15-year-old fin swimmer Danielle Faith Sanglap Torres, who captured the country’s third to the last gold medal in the 50m surface race.*PNA

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