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From an 11-year-old winning gold to a pair of sisters making their athlete-dad proud, the just-concluded Southeast Asian Games produced a number of compelling stories featuring Filipino athletes.
The 33rd Southeast Asian Games hosted by Thailand came to a close on Saturday night, with the hosts romping away with the overall title after winning over 200 gold medals.
Team Philippines finished in sixth place with a 50-73-154 gold-silver-bronze medal count. Although that fell just short of the Philippine Olympic Committee’s stated goal of a fifth-place finish (Singapore had 52 golds), our athletes still produced many standout performances and moments.
Here are five of them.
Sister Act
It’s rare for siblings to win gold medals in the same SEA Games but in different events. Yet that’s exactly what the Cesar sisters Malea and Naomi accomplished in Thailand. Sixteen-year-old Naomi got her gold first after ruling the women’s 800m run, in the process becoming the youngest-ever Filipino to win a gold in SEA Games athletics.
Over 100 kilometers away in Chonburi, where the women’s football competition was being held, proud Ate Malea was in tears after watching her baby sister cross the finish line first. Three days later Malea would join Naomi as a gold medal winner as part of the Filipinas team that won a historic gold – the Philippines’ first in SEAG history – in women’s football.
The Cesar sisters obviously have the genes: their dad Ben is a former national athlete himself, having competed as a sprinter in the 1991 Manila SEA Games. After Malea and the Filipinas won it all, she ran up to the stands to celebrate with Ben, Naomi and the rest of their family.
Queens of the sand
When it comes to women’s beach volleyball, Thailand is the undisputed champion at the SEA Games. The Thais have been untouchable ever since the event was first introduced in 2003, and entering the 2025 Games, they had won eight straight gold medals.
Expectations were thus sky-high that the hosts would easily add a ninth gold in front of their home crowd. This belief was reinforced after they swept their group stage assignments and looked virtually untouchable.
But the Alas Pilipinas team of Sisi Rondina, Bernadeth Pons, Floremel Rodriguez and Sunnie Villapando had other plans, even as history wasn’t on their side. Prior to 2025, the Philippines had never reached the final of any SEAG beach volleyball tournament and had only managed to win three bronzes.
The team already made history by simply reaching the final, but they weren’t quite done. SiPons set the tone in the first match, sweeping Thailand 1 in two sets. Rodriguez and Villapando were brought to a third set by Thailand 2, but they were just delaying the inevitable as the pair closed it out at 15-6. Finally, after 22 years, the Philippines had their own queens of the sand.
Olivia McDaniel ‘saves’ the day
Of all the 50 gold medals Team Philippines won, this was arguably the most dramatic. The gold medal match came straight out of a sports movie script: the mighty Vietnamese side aiming for a fifth straight gold against the first-time finalists from the Philippines who had to survive an opening day loss to get their shot at history.
Then there was drama in the form of a controversial offside call in the first half that denied Vietnam a goal (replays suggest the linesperson did err). At the end of 120 minutes of regulation time and extra time, neither side had scored. The fate of the gold medal would be decided via penalty shootout.
The five penalty takers from each side all made their attempts, as did the sixth from the Philippines. Vietnam’s Tran Thi Tu stepped up to the penalty spot to keep her side in the contest. Her effort went to the right, but not deep enough. Goalkeeper Olivia McDaniel snagged the ball and kept it away from the net, securing victory and a historic first-ever gold medal for the Philippines in Southeast Asian Games women’s football.
Skateboard phenom
Do you remember your biggest accomplishment when you were 11 years old? Whatever it was, it likely pales in comparison to what Mazel Paris Alegado accomplished in Bangkok.
Alegado became the youngest Filipino SEA Games gold medalist ever after topping the women’s park skateboarding final with a score of 79.72. The crazy thing is, this wasn’t even her first time to rep the country in an international competition. As a nine-year-old she finished seventh in the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games.
And it looks like the future is very bright for Philippine skateboarding: the silver medalist, Alegado’s compatriot Elizabeth Amador, is also an 11-year-old.
Double hoops gold against tall odds
The Philippines is the acknowledged hotbed of basketball in Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asian Games basketball, heading into the 2025 edition our men’s team had won the gold 19 times while our women’s team had won two of the last three. So you’ll probably have to excuse our opponents if sometimes they resort to unorthodox tactics to tilt the odds a bit in their favor.
In the lead-up to the Games, the organizers remained vague on the eligibility rules for 5×5. Earlier this year, it was reported that the “passport only” rule would be followed. This was eventually replaced by a “FIBA rules” edict, which effectively disqualified nearly half of Norman Black’s pool of players for the men’s team as well as two of Patrick Aquino’s on the women’s side.
In theory, “FIBA rules” should allow a team to suit up one naturalized player, but incredibly (or maybe not) the organizers ruled that Justin Brownlee was ineligible. All this left Black and Aquino scrambling for new players with little time left. Then on the way to their first practice, the men’s team’s bus mysteriously broke down.
In the end, none of it mattered. In fact, all of the hocus pocus likely strengthened the resolve of both our 5×5 teams and they went on to win the gold one after the other. What made the double golds doubly sweet was they both came against the host teams.
Images from the POC Media Pool and the PFF