DOROTHY Sorio Elenzano, a Grade 5 student of Nangka Elementary School in Marikina, bagged the overall silver medal to tow the Sogo Hotel-backed Philippine Team to a second overall finish behind China in the Kids’ Division of the recent 1st Singapore Open Memory Championship at the Singapore Polytechnic Graduates’ Guild in Singapore.
Elenzano took the overall silver following second-place finishes in the Names and Faces, Ten Minute, Speed Cards and Speed Numbers events of this tournament sanctioned by the World Memory Sports Council.
Providing able back-up to Elenzano was Joel Micus Lolong, who contributed bronze finishes in the Abstract Images and Binary Digits’ categories.
Philippine team coach Robert Racasa said the event served as a good preparation for the newly founded Pinoy Memory Athletes Association, Inc., which aims to host an international event soon here.
“We brought up-and-coming athletes to the event and they performed well despite only a few months of training. These young athletes will be the cornerstone of future memory athletes in the country,” said Racasa, considered the father of Philippine memory sports.
Aside from host Singapore and the Philippines, other countries which competed in the prestigious event were Germany, China, India, Japan, Mongolia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and China, which took the overall plum in the Kids’ events due to the gold medal performance of defending Kids’ World Memory Champion Li Lin Pei.
Racasa thanked their benefactors Marikina Mayor Del De Guzman and Hotel Sogo, which took care of the PH team’s registration fee, plane tickets and hotel accommodation in Singapore.
Other members of the PH team were delegation chief Marie Ann Andrade Yambalia and players Richard Sarcos, Philip Benitez and Nico Angelo Esperanza.
They competed in the different memory disciplines, where competitors displayed their memory abilities in numbers, words, dates, abstract images, cards, spoken numbers and names and faces.