7000 words on a five-foot, octogenarian weightlifting coach? The uber-long story you must read before the Olympics

“Aaaaaave Mariiiiiiiia.” It is more of a shout than Schubert. A reverberation off steel roof and cast iron weight plates. There are 10 of them on Eileen Cikamatana’s bar, totalling 150kg. The latest course on the menu is cleans in sets of two, and the methodology is always the same. Cikamatana paces, psyching herself up with self-directed verbals from every corner of her subconscious, then cracks her heels into the concrete floor as she jerks forward and into position. She lowers herself over the equivalent of a kitchen fridge she’s about to hoist onto her shoulders. Right hand wrapping around the right-hand side of the bar, left hand meeting it before sliding across to grip the other end. She blows out three staccato beats (the hi-hat intro to Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car) and then lets out a settling whistle. The next two seconds are silence. Ave Maria.

It is difficult to fathom just how strong the world’s top lifters are by simply watching them – the strain on their face is not dissimilar to that of a lay person at a local gym struggling through sets a fraction of the weight. The real evidence lies in the way the barbell bends under the load. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would know a lot more about exactly what is going on here, but even the naked eye can see that steel – one of the world’s strongest metals – is not appreciating this level of gravitational disobedience.

Eileen Cikamatana trains for the Paris Olympics under careful supervision from coach Paul Coffa.Credit: Chris Hopkins

It appears Cikamatana does not mind the exertion nearly as much. She completes her two lifts in one fluid movement, then returns the weight to the blocks and punches the air, yelling out and strolling across the floor humming what sounds like a livelier variation of The Girl From Ipanema. That 150kg is not a big deal – the 24-year-old dual Commonwealth Games gold medallist will lift close to a combined 20 tons across the day’s two training sessions. By the end of the six days she trains each week, that number can climb to almost 120 tons. Sometimes she gets home so tired she’s asleep before she can muster the energy to eat.

Cikamatana is not of this world. Heaven is a converted warehouse in Dromana. This particular street on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula is so unremarkable there is no way of knowing which in the line of industrial buildings accommodates Australia’s best Olympic weightlifting gold medal chance in four decades. Upon arrival on a Monday morning in late May, the most likely place looks like the one full of squat racks and rowing machines beyond a rolled-up garage door. But the fella who runs that gym points a couple of doors down.“It’s got to be there,” he says. “I can hear them dropping the weights from here.” Following the sound is the only sign Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders exists at all. But sure enough, up another driveway and through a nondescript door, a hidden cavern of vast riches and artefacts is revealed. And if Cikamatana is the Diamond in the Rough, her genie is Paul Coffa.

Paul Coffa shows some calf in front of his wall of champions he calls ‘The Hawthorn Machine’.Credit: Chris Hopkins

The five-foot octogenarian is the doyen of weightlifting in Australia and the Pacific, and in 2022 became the first coach inducted into the International Weightlifting Federation’s Hall of Fame. Over 59 years of coaching, he has guided 540 international-level athletes from 15 nations at 10 Olympic Games, 12 Commonwealth Games and many more world championships. The walls are a collage dedicated to glory days past, framed and unframed photos of his champions bearing silent witness to the present. Among the mass is one of his most successful, Dean Lukin, those magnificent circa-1984 thighs bulging under the hundreds of kilos that helped him win Los Angeles Olympic gold. It remains the country’s only one to date. But Coffa is convinced Cikamatana will be the next. It is why he and his wife Lilly built this gym especially for the Fiji-born heavyweight when she switched allegiances to Australia.

“Gold medal, that’s all,” Coffa says. “This will be my last one. I’ve coached 104 medals at the Commonwealth Games, including 39 gold medals. I know what victory is and what defeat is, so I know when I’m confident – and I am confident. At this level, she’s got to win a gold medal. There’s nothing else. Nothing.”

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The last time Coffa said something as blatantly bold before an Olympics was 40 years ago, when a full-time tuna fisherman from South Australia took a part-time hobby all the way to the top. Lukin, like Cikamatana, was 24, and had won his first super heavyweight Commonwealth Games gold two years prior in Brisbane. But even then, lifting remained more of a recreational activity reserved for whenever he was not out at sea fishing. When he did train, he did so out of a rusty old tin shed in his hometown of Port Lincoln.

Coffa with 1984 Olympic gold medallist Dean Lukin.Credit: Emma Kemp

It was not the ideal scenario for Leon Holme, Lukin’s school headmaster who had recognised his unique physique, persuaded him to try the sport and then became his lifting coach. In October 1983, just after winning a national title and some nine months out from his first Olympics, Lukin up and left for a five-month tuna expedition against the advice of Holme and some incensed national coaches, who did not believe the 16 weeks he had left himself to prepare after the trip was either enough to challenge the Eastern Bloc states or befitting the discipline required by the sport. As it turned out, the Soviet Union-led boycott of the 1984 Games took many of those dominant +110kg rivals out of the picture. But there were still others, including American Mario Martinez and West Germany’s Manfred Nerlinger.

Coffa, who had just turned 42 at the time and was national team coach, got a bit cheeky with the media the night before competition. “They asked me, ‘what’s going to happen tomorrow?’ I said, ‘it’s got to be gold, no question’. I remember people saying they heard me in the news, asking ‘what you saying this for?’”

The following day, Lukin did not start well and trailed in third after the first round, the snatch. When Martinez finished his second-round clean-and-jerk lifts, his total stood at 410kg. To usurp him, Lukin needed to clean and jerk 240kg – a 5kg personal best. His first lift of 227.5kg was successful. The scoring board initially signalled he would next attempt 232.5kg, until an announcement was made he would pass and go straight for gold. One emphatic 240kg lift later and the mission was accomplished. Footage from the day shows his wild celebrations with Coffa, who then sidled up to the scoreboard and nicked the little red arrow that was next to Lukin’s name for his winning lift (he still has it in his office). “That was something that you don’t forget,” he says. “He was brilliant. Unbelievable. A young kid, and nobody thought he was going to win. Nobody.” The next day, Lukin was asked if he intended to contest the Australia Games the next January. “You’re kidding,” he responded. “That’s slap-bang in the middle of tuna season.”

Coffa with the memento he nicked from the 1984 Olympics.Credit: Emma Kemp

According to a 1984 Sydney Morning Herald report filed from the LA Games, an official fact sheet about the competitors listed Lukin’s occupation as “tuna fisherman/millionaire”. The Australian team handbook named his “other interests” as “women, money”. These days he is something of an enigma. A suave property developer who has reportedly dropped so much weight his waist is slimmer than a single one of his thighs in their heyday.

“He had tree trunks for legs,” recalls Lilly. “We had a phone call from Adidas in 1984 [about the team kit], and they said ‘I think you’ve made a mistake – we have measurements here for 53 inches for this Dean Lukin. That must be the combination of both legs’. I said ‘no, that’s one thigh’. He was massive. You could never ever move him or hurry him up. He got out of a chair at his pace and walked at his pace, and he walked on dry land as if he was on a moving boat.”

Robert Kabbas.Credit: Robert Pearce

Of course, LA was also fruitful for a moustachioed Robert Kabbas, the Egypt-born light heavyweight who took home silver at his third Games and further fuelled the sport’s explosion throughout the ’80s. They were the days of Darrell Eastlake’s booming commentary, back when a young Bruce McAvaney was on the beat and an even younger Eddie McGuire was a cadet reporter. When press conferences were pure theatre and weightlifting was regularly on the front and back pages of newspapers. Coffa had a list of journalists on speed dial. In true coach form, he liked some more than others. The Age’s Ken Knox was a particular favourite. He also produced his own media in the form of ‘Wogs’ Weakly’, the Hawthorn Weightlifting Club newsletter named in honour of its many European lifters. Kabbas sketched the illustrations.

An old copy of ‘Wogs’ Weakly’.Credit: Emma Kemp

Illustrations by Robert Kabbas.Credit: Robert Kabbas

International events were staged regularly, including the 1993 IWF World Championships in Melbourne that spawned a seven-figure sponsorship deal with Telstra. Then there’s the 1986 World Cup event, during which Naim Süleymanoğlu famously defected from Bulgaria to Turkey mid-competition. The greatest lifter of the 20th century sought to escape the Bulgarian government’s crackdown on ethnic Turks, and evaded agents watching him by sneaking out through the window of a Melbourne restaurant bathroom, before being flown into exile. “He almost started a war between Turkey and Bulgaria,” Coffa says. “We kept a great relationship with the Bulgarians, and then they blamed Lilly and I for the defection.”

Naim Süleymanoğlu made front-page headlines in 1986.Credit: Emma Kemp

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Coffa migrated to Australia from Sicily in 1956. The 14-year-old arrived in Melbourne armed with zero English and not much else, and recounts “very hard” years at night school as his father, an orchestra conductor in his native Italy, opened a boot repairing business that specialised in surgical boots. His brother Sam, seven years Coffa’s senior, had already made the trip in 1952 and been boarding with a family in Hawthorn. “I arrived on a Saturday morning, and my brother took me to see Hawthorn play Geelong,” Coffa says. “I loved every bit of it, and from then on I’ve been a Hawthorn supporter all my life.”

The introduction to weightlifting occurred during the Melbourne 1956 Olympics, when he watched some of the athletes train at an army depot in Hawthorn. “I saw this superhuman person, Paul Anderson from America,” he says. “The strongest man in the world. He won gold, and that was the last gold medal in the super heavyweight that America won. After that, the Russians took off.”

Coffa opens the scrapbooks he has kept since his coaching career began in the 1960s.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Coffa started lifting in 1958 because Sam already did. The latter represented Australia at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (22nd place in the bantamweight) and at 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth. Coffa was decent. According to himself, “quite good actually”. “But I was very aggressive and very rude to people. I would abuse them,” he says. “Including the referees and coach, if I didn’t get it my way.” At a tournament in June 1965, he did not get his way, and was disqualified. He duly spat the dummy at the referees, and quit lifting on the spot. He was 23.

That same day, he was approached by Ray Rigby, a 15-year-old junior shot put champion who asked Coffa to coach him in weightlifting. “I’ll never forget what I said,” Coffa recounts. “I said ‘if I coach you, you have to do what I tell you to do. And if you abuse referees – as I had just done 10 minutes earlier – that’s it, you’re out’.”

Paul Coffa quit lifting weights after a spat with referees.Credit: The Age Archives

Within two years, Rigby had set a national heavyweight record and junior world record, and in 1968 contested the Olympics in Mexico City, before winning 1970 Commonwealth Games gold in Edinburgh. But Coffa, despite being Rigby’s coach, was not invited to either. He was deemed, he says, “too young”, and “the Australian Weightlifting Federation hierarchy kept me away for 10 years”.

Coffa leads the way up some stairs to a loft above the gym that doubles as his office. It is also a quasi-museum. He retrieves a dozen A2-sized art scrapbooks, each glued full of discoloured newspaper and magazine clippings dating back to the ’60s. One such article is an interview with Rigby, detailing his teenaged achievements and tribulations at a pre-Olympic competition in Mexico City. Rigby was hardly sleeping a wink. And not because he was “chasing the senoritas at night”, as the writer Tommy Suggs suggested. But “because I have been so nervous thinking about the competition”. That was compounded by what Suggs described as “a light touch of the ‘Mexican trots’”. Still, he completed eight out of nine attempts and set PB lifts of 358, 292 and 391 pounds. “It’s all my coach’s doing,” Rigby said, without directly naming Coffa. “Before I left Melbourne, I wrote down all my warm-ups and attempts. I have so much confidence in my coach that I knew I should make these poundages as I knew he had taken all factors into consideration including my nervousness and that nice little case of ‘gastric upset’, I believe I would call it.”

Ray Rigby, the first lifter on Coffa’s coaching resume.Credit: Emma Kemp

There were still some naive elements to Coffa’s approach, such as matters pertaining to diet. Rigby was already a big boy. By 17, he was six foot tall and 123kg heavy. “But I remember saying ‘he’s got to put on weight – it doesn’t matter what he eats, whether it’s pies or pasties or anything like that’. A doctor came back to me and said ‘that’s not the right way to coach, you’ll finish up killing the kid’. I didn’t realise at the time what putting on weight by eating pies and pasties meant.” One of the photos accompanying the article shows Rigby eating a meal, a napkin tucked into the neck of his shirt to protect his suit. The caption reads: “Ray says that he isn’t a big eater. However, this picture indicates a different story. That sandwich was the length of the box when he started.”

Coffa shows the first time he was photographed and reported on by The Age newspaper in a clipping from 1967.Credit: Chris Hopkins

In time, Coffa was deemed to have completed his apprenticeship in both coaching and the politics of Australian weightlifting, and was eventually appointed as Australia’s coach in 1974 – just in time for that year’s world championships in Manila. In 1978, he oversaw the Commonwealth Games team that travelled to Edmonton. They won nine medals, including three golds, and were awarded the Trafalgar Trophy as the top weightlifting nation (“five lifters out of 10 in that team were mine”). The following year, he became sports director of the Victorian Weightlifting Association and sought to increase the sport’s popularity among young people.

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Lilly is a talker and a winker. She has a supply of anecdotes and opinions so extensive she is not prone to gaps in conversation. “I’m like the chair – I’m always here.” Wink. She motions to the plastic seat underneath her. “I’m that silent individual who does everything in the background.” We are negotiating the prospect of taking her photo for this piece, despite her stated capacity as part of the furniture. Perhaps just one might be OK? She could even stay sitting in the chair and remain one with it? “OK, he can get one photo.” Wink. She gestures an affirmative to photographer Chris Hopkins. About half an hour later, he snaps one of her – standing up – enjoying a moment of light relief with Cikamatana. An athlete and her unofficial manager.

Cikamatana shares a moment with Coffa’s wife Lilly.Credit: Photograph by Chris Hopkins

Lilly first met Coffa as a 20-year-old while working at what was then the Hawthorn Recreation Centre. For her first six weeks in the job as assistant manager, she mistakenly believed he was the facility’s cleaner. “We had 40 staff, we were open from 5am until 11pm, and had sports and fitness classes and pools. And the manager told me some staff will come and go, and that the cleaner is just this little guy, but you may never even meet him because he comes at odd times. So of course when Paul came in, and he was arrogant and rude, I thought, ‘that must be the cleaner’.” On the occasions she’d see him come in, he was wearing an Australian tracksuit. She assumed somebody had given it to him.

Overall, she was unimpressed, and took it to the manager. “I said ‘here’s my first complaint, Neil: I’m having an issue with the cleaner. I never see him clean. He comes in every afternoon and goes straight down to where all those other guys are’. Neil thought that was strange because Les normally didn’t clean that section. Well, the next time that time he walked in I grabbed Neil straight away to show him. He says ‘that’s not Les, that’s Paul Coffa – the national coach for weightlifting’. Oh my god, the total and utter embarrassment on my part. I couldn’t show my face – not that he knew that at that time.”

In the end, she guilt-tripped herself into offering to help Coffa stuff pamphlets into envelopes for the schools program he ran for about 27,000 kids in Victoria. She noticed all the letters were addressed to boys. “I asked where the school girls were, and he said weightlifting was only a sport for boys. ‘And who says?’ I asked. He said, ‘the IWF says’. I went, ‘well that’s dumb. Schools are 50 per cent boys and 50 per cent girls’. And in those days Chiko Roll was sponsoring the program. Wouldn’t they be happier if it was the entire school body? Paul said I had a point, and he had some pamphlets made up for school girls. That’s how we started.”

Paul Coffa and Eileen Cikamatana cheer a lift by Victorian weightlifter Tessa Job.Credit: Photograph by Chris Hopkins

Lilly grew up in Hawthorn but did not come from old money like many of her peers. Her family were “very much working-class people” who “lived within your means and never asked for anything more”. She says she got the school marks to get into medicine or law at university, but followed her tomboy instincts into more sporty ventures. So even as she felt out of place parking her late father’s old brown Valiant next to the row of Porsches at the Recreation Centre, her connection with Coffa opened different kinds of doors.

Weightlifting is a passion pursuit towards which the Coffa family have dedicated almost every facet of their lives. In return, they have accumulated almost peerless influence. In 2001, Coffa and Lilly founded the Oceania Weightlifting Institute, which they moved around the region with their three kids for three decades. Both also now serve on the AWF’s high-performance commission, and Lilly is an elected director. On top of Coffa’s decorated IWF Hall of Fame coaching credentials, he is also secretary-general of the OWF and Commonwealth Weightlifting Federation, and an official with the Victorian Weightlifting Association.

Sam Coffa became AWF president in the early ’80s until he was deposed by state delegates in 2007, before reclaiming the post in 2018. The 88-year-old was also president of the Australian Commonwealth Games Association between 1998 and 2018 and is a former IWF senior vice-president who recently returned to the global governing body as an advisor to the sport’s reform after revelations of widespread corruption and the cover-up of doping threatened its Olympic status.

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

And as weightlifting’s popularity within Australia dwindled, so too did the cash. In the two years leading up to Paris, Cikamatana was the only athlete funded by the Australian Institute of Sport, on the grounds she is a likely medallist. Kyle Bruce and Jacqueline Nichele have also been selected on Australia’s Olympic team.

Lilly reasons that critics are simply victims of “the old tall poppy syndrome” which “just comes with the territory, unfortunately”. Coffa says he experienced similar back in the ’80s in relation to doping, that niggly issue the sport cannot seem to shake. “Ron Reed from the Herald Sun used to pick on me all the time,” he says. “He would say, ‘You’re using drugs, aren’t you? How can you produce those kinds of lifts?’ And yet, my life has been as clean as anything.”

Just to exist during that era was to somehow be connected to someone involved in doping. After the fall of the Berlin Wall (he has a small piece of it here in his office), Coffa helped lifters from Eastern Europe migrate to Australia. They included a group he calls the ‘Wild Bunch’, consisting of Sevdalin Marinov, Kiril Kounev, Blagoi Blagoev, Nicu Vlad and Stefan Botev, who won Australia’s last Olympic weightlifting medal with bronze at Atlanta in 1996. Vlad, a 1984 Olympic champion who won Commonwealth Games gold for Australia before returning to Romania and serving as IWF vice-president, was in 2022 suspended from the sport for life by the Court of Arbitration for Sport for covering up doping offences.

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

In the late ’80s, the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts opened an inquiry in response to allegations of widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by Australian athletes. In the second of the two extensive reports tabled by the committee in 1990, it found that, among the raft of allegedly implicated individuals, “it is likely that Mr Paul Coffa encouraged the taking of banned performance drugs by weightlifters” and “it is also likely that Mr Paul Coffa has been involved in the supply of anabolic steroids to weightlifters”.

The report quotes Coffa as saying in response to the allegations: “I have never once in my life ever been associated with drugs. My life has been devoted fully to the sport. I have produced hundreds of national champions in this country and hundreds of state champions as well as Olympic and Commonwealth Games representatives. This was all done on a voluntary basis without my ever receiving one single dollar towards it.”

In the present day, Coffa says this: “A lot of allegations were made in those days under parliamentary privilege, and you could say anything about anyone without any evidence or proof. So many accusations were made about coaches in different sports, including weightlifting, with no evidence, and nothing came out of it. The proof is that if an athlete is positive, that’s it. The proof is that, in 59 years, I never had one positive. That speaks for itself.”

Generally, he says “doping is terrible”.

“I think it was the 2012 Olympics when one of my lifters from Kiribati placed 18th or 19th. A few years later [following retrospective anti-doping violations] they’d moved up to ninth.” In 2022, International Testing Agency re-analysis of samples from the London Games led to 73 anti-doping rule violations and the withdrawal of 31 medals. Russian athletes were responsible for 21 of those – the most of any country – while weightlifting was the sport accounting for the most positive re-tests with 36.

More recently the spotlight has fallen on North Korea, which is enjoying unprecedented international weightlifting success after a four-year hiatus. The DPRK was the only country to withdraw from the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, and was consequently barred by the International Olympic Committee from all Olympic sports until the end of 2022. Its isolation from the rest of the world has meant no North Korean weightlifters underwent out-of-competition testing between 2019 and 2024. Last year, the IWF ruled that countries who block the entry of independent foreign anti-doping officials would become ineligible for IWF-sanctioned competitions. North Korea cooperated, paving the way for its athletes to compete once more under the nation’s flag at major sporting events.

Arnold Schwarzenegger meets Coffa in 2011.Credit: Emma Kemp

In February, the DPRK sent 11 athletes to the 2024 Asian Weightlifting Championships in Tashkent – its first major weightlifting competition since December 2019. All 11 left as champions. As of April’s final Olympic qualifier, the 2024 IWF World Cup, North Korean women own every single world record in the 45, 49, and 55-kilogram divisions except for the 49kg snatch (this last one only evades them on a technicality because China’s Hou Zhihui snatched her record-setting 97kg before North Korea’s Ri Song-gum equalled it on the same day). The rapid improvements have raised concerns about unfair advantage after years without verifiable doping controls. And while the country is ineligible for Paris 2024, it will have its sights set on Los Angeles 2028.

Coffa compares the situation with that of Australia, where weightlifters including Cikamatana are required to update an app with their location at all times of the day. “They are more monitored than criminals are monitored because of anti-doping,” Coffa says. “And yet they’re the cleanest people on the planet.”

The same cannot be said of the man in the framed photo shaking Coffa’s hand. Arnold Schwarzenegger, renowned steroid enthusiast back when they were legal, presented him with a glass trophy in 2011 after OWF lifters representing the Pacific Islands beat a United States team in the 2011 Arnold International Tournament held in Columbus. “He said congratulations and asked me if I enjoyed it,” he says. “I said ‘yeah, I’ll be back’. He just looked at me, and then suddenly I realised I said the wrong thing. I said ‘oh geez, I shouldn’t have said that’. He said ‘don’t worry’, and we laughed.

That wasn’t nearly as awkward as the phone conversation he had with Malcolm Fraser in 1983, when Coffa had just been awarded an MBE for service to weightlifting. The landline in his Melbourne apartment rang so early in the morning he thought the call was a prank. “It was 6am,” he says. “I picked up the phone and he said ‘Paul, this is Malcolm Fraser’. I said, ‘Yes, and I’m the prime minister, who are you?’ Then he said, ‘Good morning, Paul, this is the prime minister, Malcolm Fraser’. I said, ‘Yes, I’m the prime minister too’.” The original signed telegram from Queen Elizabeth II is framed downstairs.

The 1983 telegram communication, signed by Queen Elizabeth II, notifying Coffa he had been awarded an MBE.Credit: Emma Kemp

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There is no polite way of saying this: Coffa is really, really short. He was five foot zero when he was 12 years old, and remains exactly that 70 years later. He might have just about gotten away with 152.4cm back in Sicily, where (charts provided by unverified internet sources claim) a man’s average height is 174.2cm and a woman’s is 160.8cm. Unfortunately for him, the stereotypical body type associated with his chosen vocation makes for a relatively noticeable visual juxtaposition. But it has also had the inverse effect of ensuring he is remembered – even by senior members of the royal family.

Coffa struggles to see over the lecturn at the inaugural Australia Games press conference in 1985.Credit: Fairfax Media

It was at a function during the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Canada that Prince Philip (183cm) first set eyes on Coffa. “He walked in with the Queen, and I’m sitting in a group with some people including Robert Kabbas and Australian wrestler Sam Parker, who has now passed away. Sam said ‘hey Phil, come here and sit with us – leave her alone’. And he turned around and he sat with us. Then he said to me, ‘are you a wrestler or a weightlifter?’, and I said ‘coach’. He said, ‘you should be a jockey – you might make a lot of money’.

“Four years later, at the ’82 Commonwealth Games [in Brisbane], he comes into the warm-up area. We were winning medal after medal for Australia, and he came up to me to say ‘congratulations’. Then he said, ‘you are the one I told to be a jockey, and you didn’t take my advice’.” Genuinely, what are the chances of Prince Philip, who attended about 350 official engagements each year, recognising Paul Coffa? “Remember, please,” he points to himself. “Five foot.”

A fortnight after this visit, photographer Hopkins attends a Pacific invitational competition in Hawthorn to shoot Cikamatana and other Paris-bound lifters. The weekend-long event was a throwback to the glory days, in that it was Australia’s first international competition in 30 years, and also in that it attracted a decent crowd, including some Australian Olympic Committee dignitaries and even the odd TV camera. Hopkins sends a text from the venue, describing the experience of observing Coffa operating in his natural environment. “He’s like a god,” he writes. “The smallest god I’ve ever seen, but a god nonetheless.”

Coffa speaks to the media during June’s international event at the Victorian Weightlifting Centre.Credit: Photograph by Chris Hopkins

If the size fools you, the voice will too. This tiny deity often speaks so softly that Lilly’s hard-of-hearing sister relies on reading her brother-in-law’s lips. Curiously, this inaudibility is an asset in the Coffa-Cikamatana relationship. While she’s on the platform, the pair only half-talk to each other. Entire conversations are conducted through eye contact, body language and the odd hand signal. It’s a bit telepathic. Not like X-Men, but they could be in possession of futuristic walkie-talkies. Coffa says he reads “the moods” of his athlete. She agrees. “Sometimes he looks at my eyes and says ‘just do this exercise and we’ll go home, because you are sleeping’,” Cikamatana says. “All you have to do is look him in the eyes and he knows what’s happening.” Most of the actual talking happens after training, once she’s at home resting and refuelling. He might ring her between sessions to debrief, and ask her how she is feeling. A couple of hours later, they are back in the gym doing the usual thing.

Other coaches have been notably mystified by the style of interaction. “Why don’t they talk to each other?” a state coach in Victoria once enquired while watching Cikamatana prepare for a competition. “They expect me to scream,” he says. “She’s a joy to coach because she’s fun. She picks on me sometimes during the training session. She makes me laugh.” Cikamatana is a self-motivator. She shouts and sings and says funny things, or banters with the handful of other lifters who sometimes utilise the environment. Today one of them is Dika Toua, a 40-year-old Papua New Guinean pioneer of five Olympics and long-time Coffa student. At 16, she made history as the first female weightlifter to step onto an Olympic weightlifting platform, when women’s categories were introduced for the Sydney 2000 Games.

Coffa and Cikamatana reload the bar during training.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Occasionally, Coffa departs from the quiet-authority persona to throw a barb he knows will get under her skin and rouse her muscles. “It’s only 155kg,” he says during a set of squats. “Are you scared?” Lilly leans over and explains: “You say that to Eileen because you’ve learned over time what triggers her internally. But you need to know the athlete and modify it – words that would get the right reaction out of Eileen would make another personality crumble.”

Ultimately, though, only one of the two out there is in charge, and it isn’t the athlete. Coffa has always run a tight ship, demanding discipline and unquestioning faith in his methods. “There have been accusations I am a brute. Arrogant. Dictator,” he says. “But discipline is the most important thing.” Cikamatana, he says, is “150 per cent” discipline. “It’s like a robot,” he says. “I’m not saying they are robots, but, in a way, you touch the button and they go. The body’s ready for it, and the mind is set for it. When they’re on, they’re on. They’re the ones who win gold medals.” He, in turn, has her trust. “He knows when to push me,” she adds. “He knows when to stop me. He knows when to recuperate. He knows everything. I’m just there to lift.”

This dynamic plays out during today’s afternoon session, as Cikamatana is attempting to snatch 123kg. Her personal best, set in 2021, is 120kg. Two and a half years ago, she successfully snatched 122.5kg during training. Coffa has not let her try it again since. But now, two months before Paris, he is seeing her 122.5kg and raising her 500 grams. The blocks are in place to help reduce the load on her back and legs. Even so, this is an exercise in obscenely fine margins. Generally speaking, Coffa does not like his athletes to miss any training lifts because it can mess with mindset and risk injury. But when she does miss her first attempt at 123kg, he lets her try again. The thrill of this rarely sanctioned challenge has Cikamatana more animated than usual. Her five-person audience is egging her on. Even Coffa is feeding the fire. She misses 123kg again, which motivates her further still, rushing to re-stack the blocks that have scattered under the angled connection of the falling bar. Coffa paces over and picks up a tiny white 1kg plate to add to one end.

Now there are 124kg and the ante is upped so much that the composition of air inside the room has altered. The anticipatory noise somehow sounds louder and the hush that follows quieter. And when the weight rises above her head once more, something about the bar’s alignment over her body as she drops into the squat conveys more promise. But these margins are finer than split-seconds; they are single frames to be examined. Did her feet, during that initial movement, reconnect with the ground a few millimetres off their target? Or did her right knee collapse a half-fraction inward and bring her right arm forward with it? Whatever happened, it was enough for Coffa to draw his hand across his throat, a silent gesture to signal he was cutting her off. She did not protest the decision, just began removing plates to adjust the configuration down to his stipulated 105kg.

Afterwards, Coffa sheds light on what just went down. He explains that, because the Games are close and she is on track, “she’s got to start feeling those weights”. “She missed one, OK,” he says. “She went out again for 123kg, and then 124kg, and she almost got it. But then you get a gut feeling that something bad could happen. I get it, not her. When she wants to do it at all costs, that is when the trouble starts. That is when injury comes. That is when you realise, pull her back. The bar has got no feeling for the lifter. The bar is cold. So when it comes down, it comes down, and it’s 124kg on you. It doesn’t stop when you say ‘it hurts, don’t punch me any more’.”

Coffa gives the smelling salts to Eileen Cikamatana as she looks to break her own Commonwealth and Oceana record at the Victorian Weightlifting Centre in Hawthorn. It is her last competition before the Olympics.Credit: Photograph by Chris Hopkins

Eileen won’t try anything near 124kg again for another month. She will go back down to 105kg – already 8kg more than her nearest rival at Birmingham 2022 – and work back up to 115kg. In two weeks, at the invitational in Hawthorn, she snatches 116kg to break her Commonwealth and Oceania record. “She’s in brilliant shape,” Coffa says. “It’s not trying to show off, I’m just saying she’s at that level and I can’t take any chances. The world record is 125kg and she’s playing around with 124kg with two months to go. Today you’ve seen her missing a lift that maybe three months ago would have won at a world championship.”

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Coffa first encountered Cikamatana during his Pacific project. In 1994, having been Australian national coach for 15 years, he resigned to embark on a new challenge. He and Lilly took their kids to Nauru, where he established a National Olympic Committee and promoted the sport among locals. By the late ’90s, he was coaching 171 lifters from a population of 9,500, and Nauru had more weightlifters registered with the IWF than China. The big breakthrough came in the form of Marcus Stephen, who in 1990 won the country’s first Commonwealth Games gold medal in any sport via victory in the featherweight snatch.

Cikamatana with her Nenna at the 2023 South Pacific Games.Credit: Instagram

“The next day this gentleman came in dressed up in a black suit,” Coffa remembers. “We ran to Marcus and said ‘it’s the Queen! She wants you to come for lunch!’ He wasn’t interested. He said, ‘tell her something’. So I went back and said ‘sorry, he’s training’. The man said ‘no problem, but I just want to tell you that this is the first time that the Queen has been knocked back’.” Four years and three more golds later, Nauru’s future president got another invite. He did not make up another excuse.

After seven years on Nauru, the Coffa family moved to Fiji. “He said he was going to retire,” says Lilly. Instead he brought a building for less than $100,000, installed lifting platforms and hand-painted a sign that read ‘Oceania Weightlifting Institute’. By the time Athens 2004 rolled around that makeshift sign had brought in nine Olympic lifters from seven countries in the region.

Cikamatana was born in the small coastal village of Levuka, on the Fijian island of Ovalau, to half-Fijian and half-Welsh mother Makitalena and half-Fijian and half-Chinese father Sevanaia. She grew up running errands on the family farm, carrying 50kg sacks of pig feed and gas cylinders off and onto her dad’s truck (after retiring she intends to finish the agriculture course she has started). One of her school teachers believed that, for an 11-year-old, it constituted a solid enough foundation for a career.

A 20-year-old Cikamatana competes in Melbourne soon after defecting from her native Fiji to Australia.Credit: Paul Jeffers

By then, the Coffas had relocated the OWF, first to Samoa and then New Caledonia, and they did not cross paths until she was in Port Moresby challenging one of his lifters to 63kg clean-and-jerk gold at the 2015 Pacific Games. She did not complete the gold medal lift. “Afterwards,” Cikamatana says, “he came and said ‘where did you come from? You almost gave me a heart attack’.” Soon after that, the then 15-year-old left the family home bound for Noumea to train at the Institute.

“The Fijian coach who started with me was under Paul as well,” she says. “He told me that he can only coach me to a certain level, and Paul would take me from there. Then Paul asked to take me. I was still underage, but he took me to level that I never dreamed of, especially where I come from.” By the time she turned 18, Cikamatana had gained enough weight to contest the 90kg category at Gold Coast 2018, and enough strength and form to win Fiji’s first Commonwealth Games gold medal in 16 years and be its first woman to do so, period. Before her 20th birthday she had set four world junior records.

Cikamatana walks out on her way to breaking her own Commonwealth and Oceana snatch record in Melbourne in June.Credit: Chris Hopkins

The following year, the Fijian Weightlifting Federation appointed a new coach who insisted she leave her New Caledonia training base and return to Fiji. After a fallout with the governing body, she chose to remain with Coffa, and switched allegiances to Australia. When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the French government repatriated all non-citizens back to their native countries, and Coffa and Lily were forced to close down operations. They flew home to Victoria, and brought Cikamatana with them on a distinguished talent visa. In 2021 – 27 years after leaving Australia – they reopened the OWF on the Mornington Peninsula as a single-athlete program, set their star lifter up in a flat near the gym, and taught her to drive. Over the three years since, the couple have effectively become her second set of parents, and guided her to Birmingham 2022 gold for her adopted nation. The timing of her defection ruled her ineligible to compete for Australia at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, meaning Paris 2024 will be her debut.

And this is where it could soon get tricky. Coffa, who will turn 82 in August, plans to retire after the Games; if he does, Cikamatana is adamant she will end her own career just as she reaches 25. “They retire, I retire,” she says. “If they’re finished, I’m finished. I don’t want to get coached by anyone else, so if they’re not around, I’m not around. Because they know me, and Lilly knows my body more than anyone. I don’t like anyone else touching my body.”

That is partly due to the lengthy quad tear she sustained while undergoing external testing in 2021. “Twenty-six centimetres, to be exact,” she says. “We thought it was part of training, and I was used to pain so I couldn’t tell the difference. Then we got the scan. The injury cost me two years and two world championships.”

The context only heightens the stakes in France. Coffa will have Cikamatana lifting “heavy, heavy, heavy” weights in the final weeks of preparation, before cutting the weight to “about 50 per cent” the day before competition and then jumping up to “101 per cent” when it counts. “We’ve come a long way, and we’re waiting for this moment,” she says. “It’s our time to shine. I’m confident because my coach is confident. My body knows when I have to be serious. You have to shut out the world and be in your own bubble.” Does she hear anything from the stage? “Only Paul’s voice.” In a crowded room, that is some feat.

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