Sport

There are five major sports in the Philippines. These are basketball, boxing, billiards, football,
and volleyball. Despite being a tropical nation, ice skating is a popular sport in the
Philippines.[2] Sports such as athletics, weightlifting, aerobics, and martial arts are also popular
recreations.
Among the others there are: baseball, swimming, wrestling, underwater
diving, kayaking, sailing, windsurfing, cockfighting, horse racing, motor racing, rugby and jai alai are
also appreciated. With the sport of cockfighting being wildly popular in the Philippines, attracting
large crowds who bet on the outcome of fights between the birds,[3] and the sport itself a popular
form of fertility worshipamong almost all Southeast Asians.[4] Such sports activity as
the sport of cockfighting, related to ritual forms of worship as practices and rituals of ancient worship
intended for the blessings of the supernatural, as "in Indus Valley and other ancient civilizations,
mother goddess had been invoked for fertility and prosperity"[5] which included that
religious cockfight lay as a prime example of "cultural synthesis of 'little' and 'great' cultures"[6] due to
religious syncretisms causing the loss for some of religious significance and hence a sport, while
remaining for some as a form of fertility worship and still for others as Baal or Baalim.
On July 27, 2009, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo signed Republic Act No. 9850 into law,
declaring Modern Arnis as the Philippine National Martial Art and Sport