Filipino gold medal hope Hidilyn Diaz safe from Malaysian food in ‘kampong’ hideout as she prepares for Tokyo Games
- The 2016 Rio Games weightlifting silver medallist says she cannot even order food app delivery in her rural Jasin village house
- Diaz qualified for her fourth Olympic Games and the 30-year-old is targeting gold in the women’s 55kg competition
Sunday afternoon is usually cheat day for Filipino weightlifting star Hidilyn Diaz when it comes to food. Training out of Kuala Lumpur, though, she said cheat day was a daily hazard – that’s how much she loves Malaysian fare.
So a Covid-19-enforced move in October to a kampong (Malaysian village) in rural Jasin, Melaka – around 130 kilometres south of Kuala Lumpur – was a welcome change for the food lover.
The silver winner in the 53kg at the 2016 Rio Games – the Philippines’ first-ever female Olympic medallist – needs to watch what she eats as she prepares for an assault on the gold medal in Tokyo this summer.
“We see a lot of good things about Malaysia,” Diaz told the Post from her quarantine hotel room in Kuala Lumpur after returning from the Asian Championships in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. “We see how peaceful it is and it’s a good place for me to train as an athlete.
“Especially that now we are in Jasin because, for me, I really love food. If we stay in KL, you eat all types of different food and it’s a good thing here in Jasin where I cannot even order Grab [a delivery app like Uber Eats] food because we are really in a kampong.”
Diaz moved to Malaysia in the spring of 2020 just as the world started to lock down because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was difficult to train in the Philippines and her coaching team wanted a place without distractions and where she could prepare in peace.