News

By Brian Oliver

Dika Toua, whose appearance in Tokyo last year made her first female weightlifter to compete at the Olympic Games five times, has started her attempt for Olympics number six. No athlete, male or female, has ever done that.

Dika Toua, whose appearance in Tokyo last year made her first female weightlifter to compete at the Olympic Games five times, has started her attempt for Olympics number six. No athlete, male or female, has ever done that.

Toua, who has a 16-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, lifted on the opening day of the 2022 IWF World Championships in Bogotá, Colombia, the first qualifying event for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Four of the 11 lifters in her session were aged 17, which is 21 years younger than Toua. If she qualifies she will lift in Paris aged 40.

Toua made five of her six attempts for 70-95-165 in the women’s 49kg C Group.

With 22 rivals to come in the A and B Groups, Toua believes her best chance of qualifying is not by finishing in the top 10 in the rankings but through continental representation as Oceania’s highest-placed athlete.

Toua became a weightlifting history-maker as a 16-year-old when she was the first female  ever to lift at the Olympic Games at Sydney 2000. That was when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) first welcomed women on to the Olympic weightlifting programme.

“I was very nervous and I missed that first lift, but I soon came out and made the second one,” she said.

In Sydney, Toua lifted in the old 48kg category, and here she is 22 years later weighing only 1kg more.

“I have never weighed more than 53kg in my life,” she said.

Asked what gets harder as the years go by, Toua said it was not so much gym work as recovery.

“I tend to sleep a lot, it’s the only recovery I really get,” she said in between posing for photos with her teenage fellow-competitors. “But I always did sleep a lot so it hasn’t changed much.

“The hard part is after training. It might be ice packs, sitting in a cold bath or going for a swim – depending on the weather of course. You don’t want to be in the sea in winter in Melbourne!”

Toua, whose husband Willie Tamasi is Papua New Guinea’s national coach, splits her time between her home village of Hanuabada and Melbourne, where her long-time coach Paul Coffa is based.

Coffa, who has coached more than 100 medallists at major championships, became the first coach to be inducted into the IWF Hall of Fame at the weekend

After returning from Colombia, Toua will spend a few weeks in Papua New Guinea before heading to Melbourne in January with the entire family to prepare with Coffa for more qualifying events, including the Pacific Games in the Solomon islands in November.

Her son Paul – already as old as his mother was when she first lifted at the Olympic Games –   is not a weightlifter but her daughter Anigeua recently competed at the national championships for the first time, aged 12.

“She’s into netball, athletics and weightlifting so we’ll go with the flow and see which sport she likes best,” said Toua.

Toua carried the flag for Papua New Guinea in Tokyo last year and also at the Athens Games in 2004. Another honour was having a grandstand at the Hubert Murray Stadium in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital, named after her in September.

She might already have competed at six Olympic Games but she took a break to spend more time with her children in the years before Rio 2016 and did not try to qualify. She had been close to death in 2013 when she was diagnosed with tubercolosis and had to spend nearly four months in isolation in a hospital in New Caledonia, where she was training at the Oceania Weightlifting Institute.

“It’s hard being a mum and a weightlifter at the same time, but I don’t know when I will stop,” Toua said. “Weightlifting is in my blood.”