Wushu warrior delivers Gilas Pilipinas debuts vs Bahrain

HANGZHOU – Jones Inso of wushu delivered a bronze medal for Team Philippines on a sunny Monday afternoon when others tried very hard, but failed, to land on the coveted podium in the 19th Asian Games here.

Inso, from the rich, beautiful mountains of La Trinidad, Benguet, showed fine form to win the bronze in the men’s taijiquan-taijijian all-around event. He provided his country its second medal following another bronze from Patrick King Perez in poomsae last Sunday.

The 26-year-old Inso had a 19.216 total from the bare hand and sword play and finished behind Chinese master Gao Haonan (19.666) and Hong Kong expert Hui Tak Yan (19.49).

His bronze medal came as Team Philippines licked the wounds from setbacks on various fronts while looking forward to the first appearance of its fancied men’s basketball team tonight against Bahrain.

Inso’s feat, somehow, eased the pain of multiple losses suffered by Team Philippines in rowing, judo, taekwondo, swimming and boxing, which is relying heavily on Tokyo Olympics silver and bronze medalist Nesthy Petecio and Eumir Marcial.

But there’s none as painful as that of Kurt Barbosa in taekwondo. The Tokyo Olympics veteran who’s unbeatable in the last three stagings of the SEA Games dropped his opening match in men’s 58kg Kyorugi (free sparring) against Uzbekistan’s Omonjon Otajonov.

Meanwhile, as expected, host China started to run away from the pack with 32 gold, 14 silver and five bronze medals after two full days of top-level competition. South Korea is at 6-8-10 followed by Japan at 4-12-9, Uzbekistan at 4-4-3 and Hong Kong at 2-3-6.

A nine-year-old skateboarder, the youngest member of Team Philippines and perhaps among the 12,471 athletes in this Asian Games, made a lot of heads