Hall of Fame enshrinement up for golden girl Hidilyn
For bringing pride and glory to the country with every lift she did in an outstanding sporting journey, a weightlifting icon is set for enshrinement in the Philippine Sportswriters Association (PSA) Hall of Fame.
Hidilyn Diaz-Naranjo, who gave the Philippines its first Olympic champion after nearly a century of participation, will be bestowed with the distinguished accolade during the San Miguel Corp.-PSA Awards Night at the Manila Hotel on Jan. 27.
The 33-year-old lifter is just a few years removed from her historic feat of giving the country the breakthrough gold in the Olympiad during the 2020 Tokyo Games in what served as the highlight of a stellar career that had its roots in the small barangay of Mampang in Zamboanga.
But the impact brought about by her Olympic success and other significant victories in the international front made her deserving to be enshrined in the PSA Hall of Fame alongside the greatest athletes in Philippine sports.
Other legends
In what is the grandest Awards Night ever by the country’s oldest media organization headed by its president Nelson Beltran, sports editor of The Philippine Star, Diaz will stand side by side with first-ever Filipino Olympic double gold medalist Carlos Yulo as they share center stage in the formal affair copresented by ArenaPlus, Cignal and MediaQuest.
Yulo, 24, is the winner of the coveted Athlete of the Year honor.
Diaz is the latest legendary athlete to be elevated in the Hall of Fame by the country’s sportswriting fraternity since the late track-and-field great Lydia de Vega in 2022.
Others enshrined in the PSA “Hall” were bowlers Paeng Nepomuceno and Bong Coo, chess grandmaster Eugene Torre, pool idol Efren “Bata” Reyes, the late Fide (international chess federation) president Florencio Campomanes and global boxing star Manny Pacquiao.
Diaz virtually grew in the eyes of Filipino sports fans.
She won her first medal—a bronze—in the 2007 Nakhon Ratchasima Southeast Asian Games as a 16-year-old lass and, a year after, competed in her very first Olympic in the 2008 Beijing Games as a wild-card entry. She also qualified in the 2012 London Games, but for the second straight time, came home empty-handed.
It wasn’t until the 2016 edition of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro when Diaz, an Air Force officer, finally scored a breakthrough by winning the silver medal in the women’s 53-kilogram category, ending the country’s medal-less campaign for two decades in what proved to be a prelude to a historic golden feat in Tokyo four years after.
