PAUL LOOKS LIKE JOE PESCI IN THAT SCENE FROM CASINO

SAM
PAUL
MEET THE
Brad Fleet
age, he keeps his receding salt-and-pepper hair
slicked back, wears a tie and Melbourne ’06
monogrammed blazer, and keeps company
with the bigwigs.
Paul, 62, general secretary of the Oceania
Weightlifting Federation and regarded as
among the best – and toughest – weightlifting
coaches this country has ever produced, having
won 32 Commonwealth gold medals, looks
like a man who’s just got off a plane; which he
has, having jetted in from Fiji just for the
evening. Over a decade ago, he quit Australia
to take up coaching in the Pacific, fed up, he
says, with “bureaucratic bullshit”, lack of
financial support for local lifters and media
pillorying of the “Wild Bunch”, the name given
to a troupe of champion eastern European
lifters who, under a project started by Paul and
the Australian Sports Commission, immigrated
to Australia in the early 1990s. With his open
blue shirt, thick dark hair and gold chain, he
seems more raffish, more approachable.
The hunch proves correct. Dinner is served,
speeches are made, some memorabilia is
auctioned off and by 11pm, coffees come
around. I’m about to leave, when Paul pulls up
a seat next to me. For the next hour he answers
every question I put to him, pausing
occasionally to remove his glasses and look
wistfully off into the distance when I venture
into sensitive areas, such as where he sees
Australian weightlifting headed, or his own
involvement with lifters who have taken drugs.
He assures me that none of his lifters ever took
drugs while he was still coaching them. He’s
also adamant he’ll never coach in Australia
again; to his trained eye, local lifters don’t work
hard enough. The kids he’s got in his gym, the
Oceania Weightlifting Institute, in Sigatoka, Fiji,
however, are made of the right stuff – they
don’t need physio, or massages, or tape. When
they bust their wrists, they don’t cry like babies.
They just work even harder. The weightlifting
scene in the Pacific, he says, is like “what it was
in Australia 20 years ago”. His lifters are
workhorses, do what they’re told. He’s proud
of his nickname “The Brute”, he says, because
he works his lifters “like an animal”. I have no
reason to doubt him. When he screws his face
up in anger when talking about the Caroline
LEFT
BY JESSE FINK
RIGHT
SAM AND PAUL COFFA ARE THE BRAINS AND BRAWN OF AUSTRALIAN AND
PACIFIC WEIGHTLIFTING. BUT THE SPORT THEY LOVE HAS DROPPED THE BAR
Glenn Hunt
COFFAS
S
alvatore “Sam” and Paolo “Paul”
Coffa would struggle to put an inch over
Danny DeVito; that much is clear to
anyone who has met these Italian-Australian
brothers. But history has shown that being
short has never been an impediment to being
powerful. That is especially so in weightlifting,
some of whose biggest names are also some of
the most diminutive men in world sport.
To say, then, that the Coffas walk tall is a
cliché; but it is apt. Here, this unseasonably
warm May night, at the NSW Weightlifting
Association’s 70th anniversary celebration at
Le Montage function centre in Sydney’s inner
west, among a crowd of hundreds of well
turned-out guests and minor celebrities, the
name Coffa instantly sets these brothers apart.
Sam, 69, is the sport’s undisputed boss,
counting among his titles first vice-president of
the International Weightlifting Federation,
president of the Australian Commonwealth
Games Association, deputy chairman of the
Organising Committee for Melbourne 2006 and
president of the Australian Weightlifting
Federation. Tanned and tight-featured for his
PAUL LOOKS
LIKE JOE PESCI
IN THAT SCENE
FROM CASINO
WHERE HE
STABS A MAN
TO DEATH
WITH A PEN
114
www.inside sport .com.au
115
116
www.inside sport .com.au
William West / Getty Images
BOTTOM
David Cannon / Getty Images
RIGHT
The Coffas, aged in their teens, left the
small Sicilian town of Ferla in the ’50s for
Melbourne, where their father, Francesco,
made surgical shoes for hospitals. Sam landed
a job as a doorman at the lifting events at the
’56 Olympics, got inspired to start lifting
himself, and, with his brother, turned their local
citizens’ youth club, Hawthorn, into a
powerhouse of the sport. Sam was the star of
the pair, representing Australia at the ’62
Empire Games and ’64 Tokyo Olympics, and
becoming six-time national champion and
11-time state champion. Paul was technically
proficient enough as a lifter, winning a few
national championships and junior titles, but
his temperament was shaky.
“I was a bit of a wild lifter,” he recalls, a hint
of regret in his voice. “When the referees used
to give me red lights I really used to lose my
temper. I remember in ’65 at the Victorian
championships, I did the same thing and told
the referees off. And they warned me. So
I said, ‘Bugger you’, and I walked off... I never
looked back.”
So he took up coaching, becoming a
national-level coach by the mid ’70s and being
instrumental in securing sponsorship funds for
the sport in the ’80s and beyond. Meanwhile,
Sam moved into administration, taking control
of the Australian weightlifting team for the 1970
Commonwealth Games and muscling his way
through the ranks of international weightlifting’s
bureaucracy in the mid ’80s, being re-elected
to the post of IWF first vice-president this
March. It’s a fabulous tale, one of betterment
and improvement, the kind of inspiring
sepia-washed migrants-made-good yarn just
begging to get a run on Australian Story. But
behind it is the story of their sport; and it’s not
as made-for-TV: since 1952, only four Olympic
medals have been won by Australian
weightlifters, and only one of them gold, Lukin
in ’84. Australian lifters generally perform well
at the Commonwealth Games, where
Bulgarians, Romanians and Armenians cannot
claim ties to Her Majesty, but their achievements
Al Bello / Getty Images
face of the sport, a man who takes his place
with ease at the high table of international IWF
heavies. Paul is the backroom taskmaster, a
man whose greatest happiness is in working
young, unformed bodies into blocks of titanic
power. For close to 50 years they were a team.
So when Paul left Australia in disgust, the
foundations of an empire crumbled.
“That was undoubtedly the biggest blow
[Australian weightlifting] had,” a rueful Sam
tells Inside Sport. “Because Paul had been not
only my right-hand man, but the national
coach. He’s a great inspiration. He’s a fairly
inspirational sort of a person with a very
infectious personality and [he’s] a very
demanding bloke; and when you lose a person
like that, well, you know, you just have to
come back and say: ‘Right. What’s next?’ And
that’s where our problems really started...”
Paul, typically, is more up-front about how
his brother took the news: “He was pissed off.”
LEFT
Pileggi drugs case, something he believes was
a travesty of justice, he looks like Joe Pesci in
that scene from Casino where he stabs a man
to death with a pen. Then the clenched features
relax, and he’s warm and cuddly again.
Paul’s mojo must be working, though. Earlier,
one of his protégés, a 77kg 21-year-old piece of
four-by-two from Nauru called Yukio Peter, put
on an exhibition in the foyer, snagged a
Commonwealth record 191kg in the clean-andjerk and just failed to lift a near-world-record
200kg. There was more than just pride on the
line: Paul had promised him his red Ford Capri
if he could lift 200. The kid’s a shot at gold, not
just at Melbourne, but at Beijing. Australia,
meanwhile, a country of 20 million people
compared to Nauru’s 13,000, has no local lifters
coming through the ranks who can compete
for medals at Olympic level.
Compare this to Australia’s stocks two
decades ago, when at the ’84 Los Angeles
Olympics an unknown tuna fisherman from
Port Lincoln, Dean Lukin, won gold in the
super-heavyweight class and Egyptian-born
Melbourne lifter Robert Kabbas won silver
in the 82.5kg class. Lukin even got the honour
of carrying the Australian flag at the Closing
Ceremony. Back then, it seemed that
weightlifting was on the cusp of a golden age.
Yet the following two decades have been
anything but golden.
The reasons why are manifold and complex,
but at the heart of the tale is the relationship
between the Coffa brothers. Sam is the public
have either been largely ignored or forgotten
amid a welter of positive drug tests in recent
times. An apathetic and cynical Australian
public, grown habitually hostile to the sport
from having its trust betrayed time and time
again, hardly cares; even less so when
seemingly every top-tier lifter in the national
squad is an émigré from Caucasia whose
allegiance to their adopted country could be
called into question.
An already dire prognosis for the sport
flatlined in ’04, when Australia sent its smallest
ever team to an Olympic Games – one man
and one woman – after taking an understrength
team to the Oceania Championships in Fiji and
paying for its mistake in the most embarrassing
way possible: its men’s team finished second to
Nauru, coached by Paul.
What transpired at Athens was hardly an
improvement. Deborah Lovely, who came in at
the 11th hour to replace Pileggi, who was
involved in an infamous confrontation with
New Zealand Sports Drug Agency officials
(who were working on behalf of the Australian
Sports Drug Agency) outside Paul’s gym and
had her case to be recalled to the team thrown
out by the Federal Court, finished 13th and
well off medal standard in her division.
Armenian-born Sergo Chakhoyan, ranked
No. 1 in his class, missed all his three attempts
in the clean-and-jerk and did not even place.
National coach Luke Borreggine was devastated:
“He stuffed up, mate... I was fuming.” Paul,
who was in Greece assisting Borreggine, was
similarly rueful: “We should have won a gold
medal no question... it was there for grabs.”
If it were any consolation, at least both lifters
were clean in a sport that recorded 11 positives
during the Games, almost double that of the
second-worst offender, athletics. Yet to this
day, no-one in a position of authority within
Australian weightlifting has been made to
account for these failures. The ASC, which
commissioned a review into the governance of
the sport as far back as ’02, was promised by
the AWF that it would embrace reform, and in
late December last year, perhaps seeing the
writing on the wall, it ratified a new constitution,
reduced the number of board members from
15 to nine, and promised elections of directors
every 12 months rather than every four years.
This gave those controlling the sport a reprieve
from the suits in Canberra who control funding,
but it is a temporary stay of execution. Those
who handle the purse strings tell Inside Sport
privately that unless the sport moves to address
all its problems and shows that it is making
serious steps towards achieving those
outcomes, it will have its funding terminated.
Now, more than at any other time, Australian
weightlifting is sliding inexorably into irrelevance
and marginalisation, taking with it young male
and female lifters who burn for their sport but
who know, deep down, for whatever reason,
they cannot hope to bring home medals at the
highest level of competition.
This is especially unfortunate as weightlifting
is an exceptionally beautiful, pure sport; what
Kabbas calls “an unparalleled test of technique,
strength and courage, because you have to
maintain your technique while at the same time
probably trying to lift what to the normal
human being is superhuman”. Yet so fractured
is the sport politically that even Kabbas,
perhaps the best known person in Australian
CLOCKWISE FROM
Sergo
Chakhoyan
bombs out at
Athens 2004 –
his coach, Luke
Borreggine,
feels a great
opportunity went
begging; the
enduring image
of the Los
Angeles Olympics
for many
Australians: Dean
Lukin hoicking
240kg to win our
only Olympic
weightlifting
gold; 20 years
later, Caroline
Pileggi didn’t
even get to
the Games.
TOP LEFT
AUSTRALIAN
WEIGHTLIFTING IS
SLIDING INEXORABLY
INTO IRRELEVANCE AND
MARGINALISATION
weightlifting (Lukin has walked away from the
sport altogether), resigned as executive director
of the AWF in ’02 over what he calls “differences
between myself... and the AWF board”, after
holding the position for five years. He says he
attempted to change the culture of the sport
from within, but it proved an impossible task.
(Sam has a different view of Kabbas’s departure,
saying: “I have this firm belief that if anyone
works for an organisation, he or she ought not
to be involved in politics.”) Today Kabbas runs
his own gym, Phoenix Weightlifting Club in
Huntingdale, with his former Australia
colleague Ivan Katz, who trained with Kabbas
at the Coffas’ stomping ground of Hawthorn
Weightlifting Club. Kabbas says the set-up
“survives completely on a voluntary basis...
we’ve received no support, either financially,
morally, or in any other way, from the [AWF] or
the [Victorian Weightlifting Association]”.
Of his opinion of Sam, he says: “Sam Coffa
became president of the federation [in ’83]. The
sport was in a pretty healthy state then, doing
quite well, and for the next couple of years it
continued to do so... that was a carryover of the
period before he came into it. He’s still the
president. You’ve got to look at where we are
now. Standard wise. Number [of participants]
wise. And then people can judge for
themselves... certainly they don’t compare to
what was lifted 20 years ago.”
117
AN ISSUE THAT HAS
CAUSED THE COFFAS
NO END OF HEARTACHE
IS DRUGS
RIGHT
Tony Feder / Getty Images
LEFT
An issue that has caused the Coffas no end
of heartache is drugs. They, like most coaches
and athletes within the sport, feel hard done
by; they believe weightlifting has been unfairly
David Callow / Sport the Library
Whatever it is keeping Sam in the top job, it
is not results. The halcyon days of Lukin and
Kabbas are long gone. The brief fillip of the ’93
world championships, where Australia finished
seventh on the back of Paul’s Wild Bunch, was
a rare highlight. At the last world champs in ’03,
Australia won gold and bronze courtesy of
Chakhoyan, but failed to qualify a team because
it didn’t have enough lifters. Paul, though, is
quick to defend his brother, explaining results
alone don’t give an accurate reading of what
Sam has achieved for the sport.
“He’s a hard man. He lives for the sport,” he
says. “He tries everything possible to assist
everyone in the sport of weightlifting. Naturally
he steps over people sometimes, because he
believes there are times where you have take
the hard jump, and he’s done it. What I am
disappointed [about], what is happening to my
brother, is that the result for what he is doing,
the results are not there... he doesn’t want to be
paid, he doesn’t want a medal around his neck;
he just wants results for the sport. And I feel
sorry for him.”
Ian Jennings
Sam, though, doesn’t buy into Kabbas’s
argument. He says the federation was on its
knees financially when he took on the
presidency, and believes his legacy to
weightlifting has been “bringing it up from its
shoelaces to [becoming] a well-recognised
sport... I think the sport is very well respected.
There will always be people who say we haven’t
done things right or this right or that, whatever;
but generally speaking I think when people
analyse my last 20 years or so, they would say
that there’s been more good than bad.”
And he’s sensitive to any suggestion he
controls anything, preferring to describe
himself as at “the head” of the sport. This,
despite his nickname of “El Presidente”.
“They call me all sorts of things. They call me
Godfather. They call me Shithead,” he laughs.
“I think I’m an easygoing president. I would
like to see things done correctly. I don’t
condone too much ineptitude or amateurism...
I’ve devoted myself to such things as protocol
and diplomacy and going to look for funds
from [the Australian] Sports Commission,
Commonwealth Games, [Australian] Olympic
Committee and all those things. In other words,
being where decisions are being made... I’m a
bit like the prime minister; when the sport
doesn’t want me, they can kick me out.”
impugned by the media and by government
for its history of doping. Sam likens the zeal
of drug testers in weightlifting to a “booze bus
situation... if there is no booze bus, you won’t
catch drunken drivers”. To a degree, he and
others within the sport may have a point.
Yes, weightlifting’s list of dopers is a long one,
with two more positive tests just last year,
but ASDA’s Register of Notifiable Events for
1990–’04 reveals only 28 infractions, sixth
on the list of worst offenders, behind rugby
league, powerlifting, motorcycling, body
building and cycling.
However, an important difference is that in
most other sports, dopers are excommunicated;
cast away for good. In Australian weightlifting,
different rules apply. The sport’s pin-up boy,
Chakhoyan, was banned for two years in ’01
for using stanozolol. When he went AWOL
for three months training in Armenia before
Athens, the AOC went on red alert, and took
the step of writing to the AWF expressing
concern over his whereabouts. Coach of
Australia’s junior team Sevdalin Marinov, an
Olympic gold medallist in ’88, member of the
Wild Bunch, and son-in-law of Sam, tested
positive to steroids in ’95 and was banned for
two years. He was interviewed by police in ’03
after the arrest of Keith Murphy, an Australian
squad member for Athens, after they allegedly
found 19kg of steroids in Murphy’s car and a
quantity of human growth hormone at
Murphy’s home. (Marinov had been living with
Murphy.) Even today Sam dismisses criticism of
the appropriateness of an ex-doper heading up
a national squad – “I don’t believe that that’s an
issue... he was wrongly done [by]. Even if he
were a drug cheat... he paid his dues. So what?”
– and he won’t confirm or deny Marinov is his
son-in-law: “Family matters are family matters.”
National coach Borreggine, for his part, though
never implicated in drug use, was the subject
of an ASC investigation by future Australian
Cricket Board chairman Malcolm Speed for
making a false entry in a weightlifting
competition at Burwood PCYC in ’95. Ron
Laycock, who was banned from competition
after testing positive to stanozolol in ’93, lifted
160kg in the clean-and-jerk and 130kg in the
snatch, his results recorded as “Mr L. Knows”
by Borreggine for the NSWWA and submitted
for national ranking. Though Borreggine did
not directly contravene any rules, Speed found
in his report that his actions displayed a
“contemptuous disregard for doping policies
and procedures”.
These are old incidents, what some might call
ancient history. But perception is everything,
and the perception remains, fair or otherwise,
that the sport is awash with drugs. In September
’04, Charles Turner, chief executive of the NSW
Institute of Sport, took the step of writing to the
AWF and NSWWA to inform them that NSWIS
would “no longer be in a position to support
weightlifting as an NSWIS squad program...
after reviewing the number of positive drug
tests prior to and during the [Athens] Olympic
Games”, which the NSWWA board called
“a reflection of a larger endemic problem in the
sport and does not indicate the challenge to
eradicate enhancement drugs from the sport is
being met”.
Speaking to Inside Sport for this story,
Turner says the decision was initially made
partly because the NSWWA “hadn’t put a
submission to us”
FAR LEFT
but was ultimately
Borreggine, with
overturned
on
new GeorgianAustralian
appeal because “our
recruit Valeri
board
recognised
Sarava, at the
that
in
fact the
headquarters of
[NSWWA] program
the NSWWA at
Burwood PCYC
had done a very
in Sydney. The
good job of being
American-born,
clean. The board’s
Canadian-raised
view was that we
coach says he
owes a lot to the
shouldn’t penalise
Coffas. LEFT No,
the athletes who
it’s not Freddie
have done a good
Mercury. Robert
Kabbas wins
job here in Australia,
his second
particularly in NSW,
Commonwealth
just because the
Games gold,
sport as a whole is
Brisbane, 1982.
not clean.”
If anything, says
Borreggine, Australia
is
setting
the
example for other
nations to follow.
“I would tell anyone
to come into my
WHAT HAPPENED
TO JOHNNY
NGUYEN?
Just 1.52m tall, Nguyen
started lifting at Burwood
PCYC at age 12, and dropped
out of Granville Boys’ High
in Year 11 to concentrate
on his weightlifting. Nguyen
had a couple of attributes
that marked him for special
things: he was Vietnamese,
the first boat person to
represent
Australia
in
sport; and he had the right
man in his corner to get him to the top. His coach
was Borreggine, who to this day runs the Burwood
gym and since 1996 has been head coach of the
Australian Olympic weightlifting team. In Nguyen,
Australian weightlifting had itself a rough diamond,
one it should have been very careful to protect.
But what could have been its greatest public
relations triumph ultimately proved its worst public
relations disaster; one that speaks volumes about
the menace of drugs in the sport.
Nguyen, juggling his weightlifting training with
a full-time job as a mechanic, went on to make
his Commonwealth Games debut in ’94, and was
feted widely in the media – including this magazine,
in our July ’96 issue (INSET). It didn’t matter that at
the ’96 Atlanta Olympics he finished 17th out of
21 in the 54kg class: Australians were seeing the
perfect multicultural fairytale. Coming into the ’98
Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, big things
were expected of Nguyen, but he was hustled out of
a medal, finishing fourth. Surely his big breakthrough
would come at Sydney 2000? But on January 4, ’99,
Nguyen’s world fell to pieces when he was banned
for two years for testing positive to stanozolol in an
out-of-competition test in September ’98, before the
Commonwealth Games. According to Borreggine,
Nguyen received the steroids through a doctor. He
chose not to appeal his sentence and returned to
being a mechanic, though Borreggine says Nguyen
has made repeated unsuccessful attempts to return
to weightlifting: “Ever since that day, I have not let
him back into my gym or into my club.”
Borreggine is still bitter about the whole affair:
“I had tears in my eyes. It killed me. Because I was
betrayed. If you’re gonna take something, fucking
tell me at least, for Christ’s sake. Therefore I can
kick you out... you only get one chance with me.”
gym 24/7 and test any of my lifters. Any time
they wish,” he says. “Overseas we [weightlifting]
do it tough. And there are countries that are
still getting away with it. But nothing beats
ASDA of Australia, mate... nothing. If they had
that policy in some of their own countries,
boy, I could see the standards dropping
whereby we would be elevating ourselves to
the point where we would be very competitive
at international level. I mean, not top ten; I’m
talking top five. When you’re top five, you’ve
got a shot at a medal.”
119
BUCKETS
OF PISS
Paul Coffa says he has “zero tolerance” for
any lifter who boozes, but back in the ’80s, he
was more forgiving of the odd tipple. One of
his charges, Bob Edmond, a former Carlton
footballer who became a weightlifter in the
early ’70s and managed to win silver at the
’78 Commonwealth Games in Canada, despite
suffering pleurisy, was a big drinker. “When
Bob used to drink, he used to drink, man,” he
laughs. An incident that sticks in Paul’s
memory was at the ’82 Commonwealth
Games in Brisbane, when the team was
notified that they would be drug tested. So
Edmond took a young Dean Lukin aside. “He
was teaching Dean how to get rid of a full
fridge of beer... they were laughing, sitting in
there [the drug-testing room], and they kept
me and the coaches out for four hours waiting
for them to pass water. When they did, they
needed a bucket. It was so funny.” Lukin
ended up winning gold, and Edmond silver.
him and his big ideas. Take Tatiana Grigorieva
at Sydney 2000, he says. Russian, but a trueblue Aussie. Not a word of complaint. “Look at
the situation today,” he rails, the spittle flowing.
“The Commonwealth Games next year. The
gold medals. Sarkisian. Armenian. Karapetyn.
Armenian. Chakhoyan. Armenian. These are
the gold medals... the only chance we have of
winning a gold medal with a name of, ah, an
English, er, typical Smith, is Chris Rae in the
super-heavyweight. Or Corran Hocking. That’s
it. Forget about any others. That’s it. Finished.
What is the difference between ten years ago
and today? Today, nobody’s talking about it.
Ten years ago, it was a disaster.”
But even with the more professional
Armenians in tow, there are troubling signs of
an insidious syndrome in the sport. Paul hosted
The Wild Bunch, gone and mostly forgotten. (L TO R) Nicu Vlad, Blagoi Blagoev, Kiril Kounev,
Stefan Botev and Sevdalin Marinov. Marinov, Sam’s son-in-law, is now coach of Australia’s junior team; Itte Detenamo
of Nauru, one of Paul’s brightest prospects; Botev wins Olympic bronze for his adopted country at Atlanta 1996.
John Gichigi / Getty Images
RIGHT
BOTTOM
Ezra Shaw / Getty Images
RIGHT
Sebastian Costanzo
Stefan Botev (a bronze medallist at Atlanta 1996
for Australia), Kiril Kounev, Blagoi Blagoev and
Marinov. Paul had met the world championpedigreed lifters in a Sheraton hotel room in
Sofia in ’90 and given them immigration papers,
advising them to go through what he calls “the
proper channels”. A year later they arrived in
Australia, causing a media circus around the
world and resentment among some local lifters
who saw their chances of qualifying for the
national team go up in smoke.
“We had world champions. We couldn’t even
get a single dollar,” curses Paul. “A thousand
dollars was a big deal. You’ve got a beautiful
institute [the Australian Institute of Sport]
and a system that is supposed to develop
champions, and you are giving nothing to the
athletes... it was peanuts. Peanuts. Literally
peanuts. Not even a thousand dollars for the
year. Nothing.”
Paul’s hope was that the influx of these
hardened, ultra-professional athletes would
raise the standard of local lifters. In his and
Sam’s view, this was realised, but Kabbas says
“their success came at the expense of some of
the home-grown programs and athletes”.
Hogwash, retort the Coffas.
“The local lifters flourished. They were
caught in this surf wave... they were training
two or three times a day,” says Sam. Paul
concurs: “Everybody improved... if they would
have stayed back and been looked after, we
would have had a brilliant team [today].” In the
end, every member of the Wild Bunch, except
Marinov, went back to Europe.
It’s clear Paul sees his experiment as being
ahead of its time. Perhaps Australia wasn’t
ready for it. Perhaps Australia was too small for
LEFT
Above all the sport’s problems, however,
is one that is perhaps the hardest of all to fix.
Full-time professionalism. Those two words are
a pipedream for most Australian lifters, who are
handicapped even before they get to the stages
of the world’s top events by virtue of the fact
that they have to work to put food on the table.
In the sport’s hotbeds of talent, eastern Europe
and Caucasia, lifters do nothing but train, eat
and sleep. When they win, they are showered
with money and rewards, treated like demigods,
much the same as we in Australia fete our
cricketers and footballers.
So, if Australia wants to win Olympic gold in
weightlifting, the choice facing it is stark. Says
Sam: “There are only two ways you can do it:
one, you are professional at it. That is to say,
you are paid to do this work, and that is to train
and train and train, two and three times a day,
which is what they do overseas; or go on
drugs. One or the other. There is no other way
that you can achieve that sort of success... you
cannot be an amateur these days if you want to
win a gold medal.”
To that end, Sam has had some success
helping secure ASC Direct Athlete Support
Program grants of $20,000 each for 11 elite
members of the Australian Commonwealth
Games Shadow Team, part of a broad $52.3m
package for athletes across a range of sports to
help them prepare for Melbourne 2006 and
through to Beijing 2008. It’s not much, especially
when those eligible for the grants have to be
earning less than $50,000 per annum in the first
place. Still, it’s enough to make Paul sick. Sick
with regret at an opportunity wasted. He still
hasn’t gotten over the treatment of the Wild
Bunch: Romanian Nicu Vlad and Bulgarians
Jed Jacobsohn / Getty Images
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE
a couple of Australian lifters at his gym recently
to give them a taste of coaching, Coffa style,
and was aghast at what he saw. “They just
broke down in three days. They’re crying.
Literally crying,” he says, disgusted. His
“coconut lifters”, as he says he used to
disparagingly call them when he was coaching
in Australia, train three times as much as the
Australians, and injuries don’t stop them.
Borreggine agrees some local athletes are
lacking hunger. That is not to say all Australian
lifters don’t have the right stuff; Borreggine
assures Inside Sport that the young men and
women in his gym in Burwood bust their guts
and he works them hard, but he also readily
admits that when he recently called for
national-team lifters to come to a training camp
in Fiji, 40 per cent of them pulled out,
complaining the weather was too hot and the
facilities weren’t to their liking.
“Hey, mate. Can I ask you something?”
says Paul, over the phone from Darwin, where
he’s just finished watching his charges clean up
at the Arafura Games. One of them was
18-year-old Nauruan Itte Detenamo. A week
later he would go
on to win a bronze
medal
in
the
105+kg clean-andjerk at the ’05 Junior
World Weightlifting
Championships in
Busan, South Korea
– the first Oceania
male lifter to win a
medal at a world
junior champs since
Steve Kettner, also
coached by Paul, in
’87. “Make it good,
eh. Don’t just throw
stones all the time,
for Christ’s sake.
Just make it a good
thing on the sport.
I’m not saying you
have gotta be one
way or the other,
but at least be
FULL-TIME
PROFESSIONALISM.
THOSE TWO WORDS
ARE A PIPEDREAM
FOR MOST
AUSTRALIAN LIFTERS
fair – give us a fair go.”
It’s easy to understand where Paul is coming
from. The man speaks from the heart. Anyone
who cares to go down to Borreggine’s
Burwood gym, for instance, where the
equipment is old school but the commitment
and passion is topnotch, will come away
thinking these weightlifters deserve a fair go.
There are run-down gyms like it all around the
country. All over the Pacific. They only survive
on the goodwill and dedication of the coaches,
who don’t do it for the money – there is none.
They don’t do it for the kudos – no-one wants
to know. They’re doing it for the athletes;
young people, some from the wrong side of
the tracks, who are looking for some discipline
in their lives, who grind it out day after day,
who can’t rely on money from big-name
sponsors or TV-rights revenue streams, who
pray they’re not going to blow a knee or bust
a wrist and miss their chance at making a junior
or senior squad. You won’t find a more
deserving bunch of kids. Yet, inevitably,
somewhere along the line, bigger issues in
the sport beyond their control become a
problem not just for them, but for sponsors,
for the media, for government, and for us,
the public. It’s these issues that the
administrators of weightlifting, at a national
and international level, have continued to fail
to satisfactorily address.
All within the sport agree Sam and Paul Coffa
have made Australian weightlifting what it is
today. Exactly what it is today – that’s the part
no-one can agree on.
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AUSTRALIA'S SPORTING MAGAZINE