He was banned for life. The Olympic gold medallist is now handing out awards

A disgraced senior international weightlifting official banned for life for covering up doping offences has presented awards at an elite competition and attended a youth camp in Melbourne, drawing the attention of Sport Integrity Australia.

This masthead can also reveal a former Australian Olympic team coach was appointed to the board of the Australian Weightlifting Federation last year just eight months after a tribunal found he had bullied and engaged in racial discrimination towards a lifter in western Sydney.

Australia is sending three weightlifters to the Paris Olympics, among them Fijian-born Eileen Cikamatana, who is considered a genuine chance of snapping the country’s 28-year medal drought with the bar.

But concerns have been raised with the Australian Sports Commission about nepotism, cronyism and dysfunction in the running of the core Olympic sport in Australia, while athletes have been left to pay to travel to compete in overseas events themselves.

One of the issues to rear its head in Australian weightlifting has been the appearance of former International Weightlifting Federation vice-president Nicu Vlad at competitions and at a junior camp in Melbourne.

The Romanian Olympic gold medallist was suspended from the sport for life in 2022 by the Court of Arbitration for Sport after an investigation by the International Testing Agency into top officials’ complicity in anti-doping violations.

Romanian Olympic gold medallist Nicu Vlad was suspended from weightlifting for life in 2022.

The 60-year-old was invited in March 2023 to present cash prizes to lifters on behalf of a sponsor at a Pacific invitational competition in Hawthorn, in inner Melbourne, at which Olympics-bound lifters competed.

In March this year, he also attended a camp at the Phoenix club in south-east Melbourne at which 10 young lifters were training.

Under the anti-doping prohibited association rule, athletes are forbidden from knowingly associating with anyone serving a doping-related sanction including receiving coaching from them.

“Sport Integrity Australia is aware of the matter and continues to assess any information provided to us,” said a spokesperson for the government agency.

‘He’s a personal friend of mine, and just because he’s been suspended for life, it doesn’t mean he’s not a good friend of mine.’

Sam Coffa, Australian Weightlifting Federation president, on Nicu Vlad

“Sport Integrity Australia has engaged with the Australian Weightlifting Federation and Victorian Weightlifting Association regarding their obligations to ensure their athletes and other people are aware of the risks of prohibited association.”

Vlad has long-standing ties to Australia, including competing for the country at the Commonwealth Games and winning three gold medals in Victoria, Canada, in 1994, and spends part of the year living in Melbourne.

He is close to Australian Weightlifting Federation president Sam Coffa and his younger brother, Paul, a highly decorated international coach who is secretary-general of the Nauru-registered Oceania Weightlifting Federation and the Commonwealth federation as well as being an official with the Victorian association.

“I wasn’t in town when Nicu showed up at the competition,” said Sam Coffa, who was also president of the Australian Commonwealth Games Association between 1998 and 2018 and is a former International Weightlifting Federation senior vice-president.

Sam Coffa has been the dominant force in weightlifting in Australia for most of the past four decades.Credit: Steve Christo

“Yes, he was invited [to present awards] but it’s all been sorted out. It’s not a big deal, but nevertheless it was a mistake that was made and it won’t happen again.”

Vlad was also at another Oceania competition in Melbourne this month but Sam Coffa insisted “he was not invited to anything”.

“If he shows up, there is nothing you can do about it,” he said.

“He’s got a house in Melbourne … he shows up from time to time in Melbourne and stays here for a few months. He’s a personal friend of mine, and just because he’s been suspended for life, it doesn’t mean he’s not a good friend of mine or a good friend of Paul, for example.

“We get together, we have dinner together sometime, but that’s all there is as far as I’m concerned.”

Asked about Vlad attending a youth training camp in March, Paul Coffa said: “He went to the Phoenix because his godson was lifting, and he sat down with his father and took a picture with him sitting down. The other time was an international tournament where his godson was lifting, and he attended. That’s all. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Sam Coffa, 88, who lifted for Australia at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, also defended the appointment of former Olympic coach Luke Borregine to the Australian Weightlifting Federation board and its newly assembled high-performance commission last August.

Borregine was found at the government-established National Sports Tribunal in December 2022 to have engaged in conduct that “constituted harassment, bullying and discrimination on the basis of race” towards a female lifter of Chinese descent.

The allegations, which he denied, related to an incident at a Sydney Olympic Park gym in which Borregine, then chief executive of the NSW Weightlifting Association, was accused of threatening to ban her from the venue if she did not finish her training earlier, shouting: “Did you leave the gym at 12pm on Saturday as I told you? Do you understand English? Do you need a translator?”

Luke Borregine (right) has been a trainer for Wests Tigers in the National Rugby League as well as a national weightlifting coach. This file picture shows Ben Reynolds (left) in training.Credit: Simon Alekna

The veteran coach, who had been angry at the woman’s teammate playing loud music in the gym, was also found to have harassed, bullied and failed to respect her rights, in breach of the sport’s member protection policy, on a separate occasion three days earlier in January 2022.

The tribunal said the offending conduct was at the lower end of the scale, with the more serious behaviour happening on just one occasion, but suspended his Australian Weightlifting Federation membership for two months and directed him to provide a written apology to the lifter and undertake education on the member protection policy.

Borregine launched an appeal, arguing insufficient weight was given to his good character and reputation, and the nature of the sanctions demanded a higher level of proof. It was dismissed, although his penalty was downgraded to include only education and a warning.

“Luke Borregine was completely dealt with by [the National Sports Tribunal] and he’s entitled to be appointed or be nominated to anything,” Sam Coffa said. “Luke is a very, very experienced official. He’s been involved in the sport for 40 years ... and has a lot to offer.

“Before we appointed him, we made sure from [Sport] Integrity Australia that whatever we were doing was OK with them.”

Contacted by this masthead, Borregine said: “I’m not talking about any of that, it’s old news. It’s gone, it’s buried. We move on with life. I’ve done heaps for my sport, over and over again, raised a lot of money. I still do my duty voluntarily for my sport after 50 years. I’ve produced Olympians, Commonwealth gold medallists, done heaps for my country.”

He added of the tribunal decision: “At the end of the day, I was never asked to apologise.”

This masthead is also aware of a complaint that was made to the Australian Weightlifting Federation by an athlete about what they claimed was bullying of them by a coach at a major international competition in the past two years.

And in another case brought to the National Sports Tribunal this year, the governing body was determined not to have given Commonwealth Games lifter Jackson Roberts-Young a reasonable opportunity to make the Australian team when it suddenly raised the minimum qualification standards for the Oceania championships nearly three-quarters of the way through the selection period.

Like many Olympic sports, weightlifting struggles for cash, so much so that only one athlete, Cikamatana, whom Paul Coffa coaches, was provided with funding from the Australian Institute of Sport in the two years to Paris as a likely Olympic medallist.

The Australian Sports Commission’s high-performance funding of weightlifting has tumbled from $512,600 in 2020-21 to $291,000 in 2023-24, and the financial situation for athletes is so grim that they were told would have to pay their own way to the world championships in Bahrain in December and to the Commonwealth championships in Fiji in September, with money only set aside for team support personnel costs.

The power base in weightlifting in Australia and the region has rested with one family, the Coffas, for most of the past four decades. Paul and his wife, Lilly, also serve on the body’s high-performance commission and Lilly is an elected director.

Another long-time key figure has been integrity officer and current appointed director Boris Kayser, a Melbourne barrister who represented standover man Mark “Chopper” Read, who named his dog Kayser after the lawyer.

The diminutive Coffa brothers, who migrated to Australia from Sicily in 1952, presided over a boom in the popularity of weightlifting in the 1980s following the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, at which Dean Lukin won gold, Robert Kabbas silver and Paul Coffa was the national coach.

But amid the proliferation of doping in the sport globally, they and Kayser were admonished along with other officials by the Senate Drugs in Sport inquiry in 1990. It was stated in its report that “the committee considers that the present board of the Australian Weightlifting Federation is unsuitable to hold office”.

Sam Coffa continued as president until 2007, when he was deposed in a vote by state delegates. He reclaimed the post in 2018 and was later brought back by the International Weightlifting Federation as an adviser to the sport’s reform after revelations of widespread corruption and the cover-up of doping threatened its Olympic status.

He made no apologies for shaking up the Australian high-performance system in the past two years, including increasing qualifying standards, saying it had been done to address disappointing results.

He also bristled at suggestions there was favouritism in coaching and other appointments to shore up control of weightlifting, saying people who made such claims probably had an axe to grind.

“They’re what I would call losers,” he said. “We do what is right to be done.”

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