As expected, World No. 2 pole vaulter Ernest John Obiena gave the Philippines a gold medal at the 19th Asian Games here on Saturday night, exactly a week since the meet opened.<\/p>\n
The 27-year-old Obiena cleared 5.90 meters to outclass the competition at Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre Stadium for the country’s first gold after a silver and six bronze medals.<\/p>\n
His feat erased the Asiad record 5.75m of Japanese Seito Yamamoto set in the 2018 Jakarta-Palembang edition.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s Huang Bokai and Saudi Arabia\u2019s Hussain al Hizam both had 5.65m but the local bet took the silver on countback.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn’t want to stop at 5.90,” Obiena told reporters, referring to his attempt at 6.02m. “I’m excited to take this medal, put it on a shelf, but I would have liked to hit a record in front of an Asian crowd. That would have been amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have it in me, but this is one of the biggest stadiums I’ve been in and one of the most amazing crowds,” he added.<\/p>\n
Obiena was the first Filipino to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics after a 5.82-m finish at the Bauhaus-Galan tournament in Stockholm, Sweden in July.<\/p>\n
He finished second to World No. 1 and hometowm favorite Armand Duplantis. (PNA)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Filipino pole vaulter EJ Obiena soars to victory, breaking records and securing the Philippines’ first gold medal at the Asian Games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2265,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-great-filipino-story"],"pageone_source":{"pageone_source":"","author_name":"PAGEONE Online Network"},"_pageone_source":"","zyndk8_nxtgen_metadata":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/energetic-pink-donkey.109-123-235-239.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}