Deconlay, Mary Ann L. Article Sports in the Philippines Sports in the Philippines are sport activities in the Philippines.

Basketball and boxing are the most popular sports in the Philippines. Other sports played in the Philippines include football and volleyball. 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. Sports such as athletics, weightlifting, aerobics, and martial arts are also popular recreations. Other sports including baseball, American football, swimming, wrestling, underwater diving, kayaking, sailing, windsurfing, cockfighting, horse racing, motor racing, 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, and the sport itself a popular form of fertility worship among almost all Southeast Asians. 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" which included that religious cockfight lay as a prime example of "cultural synthesis of 'little' and 'great' cultures"due to religious syncretism 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.
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Differences The United States of America (USA) has sent athletes to every celebration of the modern Olympic Games, except the 1980 Summer Olympics, which it boycotted. The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) is the National Olympic Committee for the United States. Thomas Burke was the first athlete to represent the United States at the Olympics. He took first place in both the 100 meters and the 400 meters of the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. American athletes have won a total of 2298 medals at the Summer Olympic Games and another 253 at the Winter Olympic Games. More medals have been won in athletics (track and field) (738, 29%) and swimming (489, 19%) than any others. The United States is the only country to have won at least one gold medal at every Winter Olympics, and has won the total medal count at Lake Placid in the 1932 Winter Olympics and at Vancouver in the 2010 Winter Olympics. The United States has won more gold and overall medals than any other country in the Summer Games and overall. The US also has the second-most overall medals at the winter games, trailing only Norway. Philippines at the 2012 Summer Olympics .The country is represented by 11 athletes who are competing in 8 sports, making it the smallest Philippine delegation to the Summer Olympics since 1936. Four of the athletes received their spots because each country is entitled to send two representatives each, for the swimming and athletics categories. The other 7 athletes won their spots by participating in the various qualifying matches around the world

Sports in the United States Sports are an important part of the culture of the United States. The four most popular team sports are ones that developed in North America: American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. The major leagues of these sports, the National Football League (NFL), the Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL) enjoy massive media exposure and are considered the preeminent competitions in their respective sports in the world. Three of those leagues have teams that represent Canadian cities, and all four are among the most lucrative sports leagues in the world. Soccer (association football) is less popular as a spectator sport in the United States than it is in many other countries, though it has wide participation in amateur and semi-professional levels, particularly among youths and people of Latin American descent, who constitute people from Mexico all the way down to South America. The top league, Major League Soccer, continues to grow and is starting to approach the level of the NBA and the NHL in terms of attendance, although it lags far behind in average salary and TV interest, and many American soccer fans are still more likely to follow national competitions and European leagues more than Major League Soccer. Professional teams in all major sports operate as franchises within a league. All major sports leagues use the same type of schedule with a playoff tournament after the regular season ends. In addition to the major league-level organizations, several sports also have professional minor leagues. Sports are particularly associated with education in the United States, with most high schools and universities having organized sports. College sports competitions play an important role in the American sporting culture. In many cases college athletics are more popular than professional sports, with the major sanctioning body being the NCAA. This page was last modified on 3 August 2012 at 10:10.