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Salvatore ‘Sam’ Coffa is a living legend in the weightlifting world. At almost 90, he is a privileged witness of our International Federation’s rich history. For more than seven decades involved in our Sport, as an athlete, coach, official, and successful administrator, Coffa is also a remarkable storyteller. With his outstanding vitality and outstanding memory, he sat down for a couple of hours and recalled his life. An existence marked by initial difficulties in his homeland (Sicily, Italy) but also with many achievements in his adoptive country, Australia. As part of the IWF’s 120 years celebration, we publish the first part of his exclusive interview, where he recalls his childhood and teenage years, his introduction to weightlifting, and his athletic career, culminating in the dream of his life, the participation in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Let’s start from the beginning. You were born in 1936, in Sicily. And then you left for Australia in 1951. How were your childhood and teenage years? What was your family context?
The family context was a post-war one. I was about 10 years old when the war ended – as you may imagine, living in Italy, those were really difficult times…

Education-wise, could you go to school?
In education terms, I entered school late because as I was born in January I had to wait until I was six. But the family is very poor, and they want me to start work, so they said, ‘You don’t go to school.’ They got my uncle, who was a teacher, to train me and I eventually succeeded in the exams. This just gives you an idea that things were tough. No food, not much to go about. And I lived in those few years under fascism. Mussolini told us that we had to wear green pants, black shirts, and march in the street to the beat of the drum. That is something I have never accepted: someone telling me what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

But do you still have memories of that?
Oh, yes. I have memories because my mother didn’t have a way to produce green pants. She did not have the material to make it! She eventually sought help from another uncle who owned a bar. In this bar, there was a billiard table, and he had just removed the green cloth and put a new one so with this old green one she made a pair of pants. But this material was like sandpaper, which provoked a rash in my legs, a kind of allergy. So that’s why I remember it so vividly!

Sam Coffa (left) at the age of four, with his older sister

The idea of leaving those precarious conditions then made its way…
I thought, no, I cannot live under these conditions. Somehow, we must seek alternatives. We decided we could go to three locations: Switzerland, Argentina, and Australia. My father thought that Switzerland was too close, we would be going back every fortnight, every week, and we would waste money. The idea was to go overseas. Stay there five years, six years, make a few dollars, and come back. And that was the plan. And so we chose Australia because it was very far.

Did you have anyone there from your family already?
Yes, I had one uncle, the one who coached me for my school work. He eventually provided accommodation for me and my father when he arrived in Australia. Don’t forget I was still in my teenage years… However, and despite not speaking a word of English, within 18 months we started a business.

And the rest of the family, remained in Italy?
Yes, we are four siblings – I have a brother and two sisters. I am the older boy, so I quickly became the breadwinner of the family. I learnt English quite quickly and after some years, my father wanted us to go back. I decided that I would not go back, I just said to my father, ‘Sorry, you can go back, I’m staying’. In the meantime, I had also met who would become my future wife… And he said, ‘No, this is not good, either we stay or we all go’. As my sister got engaged in Italy, she would not come to Australia. We couldn’t fulfill what my father was saying. Either all in Italy or all in Australia. In the end, some remained in Europe and we stayed in Australia. My younger brother Paul, and the rest of the family, joined us in 1956.

Despite the move, those first years in Australia were also not easy…
Very complicated. None of us spoke a word of English! Not one word. My father had many problems, but I used to go and do the shopping. I could then start translating some words and read the few signs in the shop.

And soon after that, you launch a shoe-repairing business?
To be more exact, our business was bespoke orthopedic shoemaking. We used to make shoes for people who had something wrong with their feet or their legs, particularly children, if they were born with bendy legs and all this. We worked together with the hospitals. We also repaired shoes, bags, and all sorts of things like that.

And how weightlifting came across in your life?
We were already in Australia. Back in the village, in Italy, believe it or not, I was the goalkeeper of the local football team. At the age of 12, I was the same height as what I am now… So, I was considered to be a giant, but I never grew… So when I arrived in Australia for reasons which I would never know, I had this idea that I would want to go to the Olympic Games.

Nothing less than that?
I just wanted to be an Olympian, and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought ‘What can I do’? I was not brave enough to be a boxer. I didn’t mind wrestling because I had still big legs. And a strong torso. Or weightlifting. Things like this. So I chose wrestling as number one – I did Greco-Roman wrestling for quite some time. We used to wrestle on canvas mats, which left burns on my cheeks. And they never healed. Because as soon as they would heal a little bit, you’d go back and blood would come out. And it was terrible. At the same time, I was going out with my girlfriend then. So she said, ‘You know, I don’t want to go out with a guy like this, with a destroyed face!’ So that’s the end of my career as a wrestler.

Competing at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth (AUS)

That was definitively a short career…
The nearest thing to it was weightlifting. And so I quickly went to the local boys club and said, ‘You know, I want to be a lifter.’ And they said they had no coaches and no specific equipment. They told me ‘You can bring your own equipment. And you try it by yourself in the corner of the room.’ It was a big basketball court.

And did you have any equipment?
No, I didn’t have any equipment, but the person I was living with had some homemade material. Just one bar with a screw at the end and a 40kg weight. I could get some additional weights and started doing some training twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. But you know, when you do something new, some people would come in and look and say ‘Can I do some too?’ And that’s how I started. I knew nothing about weightlifting. I read Bob Hoffman’s [US weightlifter and bodybuilder, co-founder of the ‘Strength and Health Magazine’, in 1932] books about weightlifting, the Press, the Snatch, the Clean and Jerk, the Total, and all that. And we started there. And then, instead of two, we were three, then four, five, and so on… And then I had a team of about ten youngsters who wanted to do weightlifting like me. Without coach. I then became the coach. And then the committee of this youth club said, ‘Well, look, you are one of the biggest groups.’ We were now a weightlifting club! It grew in front of me. And I started to worry because I didn’t have any knowledge of the sport. So we asked the committee to do something about it. Firstly, to get a proper set of weights.

Did it work out?
Yes, the Rotary Club of Hawthorn came to our rescue and they bought us a set of weights, then they somehow found somebody who had done weightlifting, and he came in to give us a couple of lessons. And the Hawthorn Club officially started.

Sam Coffa (left) with his weightlifting teammates

When did you start competing?
The club itself started competition in 1958. This man gave us a few hints, and in the end they gave us another room to progress. And we grew from there, really. With that, we also completely ruined the floor and had to repair it!

I started to evolve as a coach and we had 25, 30, 40 people in this room. We started to lobby the council, and the local government, to see if we could find something else. Come the year 1962 and I was selected for the Commonwealth Games in Perth. I had won the state and national title and I ended up being a Commonwealth Games representative. The council thought this was terrific for the community, as I was the only one from that club that went to the Commonwealth Games. They thought they should capitalise on that and they did. We managed to get a purpose-built weightlifting centre in Hawthorn! It wasn’t elaborate but we had a big hall, we had a kitchen, we had a sauna, and so I was in charge of it. We stayed there for some years until 1964 when two members of the club went to the Olympic Games, and this put another pressure. We urged the council to provide us with even better facilities…

And you are one of these two Olympians. You had fulfilled your goal! How was the feeling, the long trip to Japan…
I had made a long trip before, coming to Australia, but by boat… The plane was something new for us. We were kids and we jumped in the overhead where you put the luggage – we didn’t know what we were doing! The first stop was a training camp in Sydney. This was also completely new. We went to the port, and there you could buy crayfish, lobsters, and king-size prawns. I tasted some and it didn’t taste good. However, the night before we left the camp, we were offered a nice dinner. On the table, there were prawn cutlets. Big prawns, king-size. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is sophisticated’. And I said to my friend, ’We’ve got nothing to eat here, only prawns. What are we going to do?’ Well, he said, ‘We just have to eat some.’ And of course, I tasted one. It was delicious. I’ve never stopped eating them!

Also a trumpet player!

Before recalling the competition in Tokyo, and as a resident in Melbourne, the 1956 Games were perhaps your first Olympic “experience”. Were you there as a spectator?
The 1956 Games in Melbourne were the catalyst for me getting into weightlifting. I was lucky enough that the training hall for the weightlifting was within 200 metres from my shop. Honestly, just one street out. And so at midday, for lunchtime, I used to take my bike, go there, and watch the greats of America, like Tommy Kono [bio here].

So you never watched the competition, just the training?
At this stage, I was only watching the training, and taking pictures, because I used to do a bit of photography, and then go back and get signatures. Then I thought, ‘This is what I want to do!¨ I went to this training hall day after day and the man in charge there said, ‘Listen, you’re coming in every day. What about if you stay at the door to open it? If you do a good job, I’ll give you the position of doorman at the Olympic Games.’ I just jumped at it. And I was at the Olympic venue door when the super heavies were contested. I opened the door and shut the door when it finished at one o’clock in the morning. It was something that blew my mind. And that’s when my brother Paul arrived in Australia. And so he joined also the club. And he was the same as me. Same category. And I was extraordinarily good in the Press, which was one of the elements. But he was very good in the Snatch and the Clean and Jerk, but he was terrible in the Press. So in all the time we competed together, he was always beaten because he just couldn’t catch me after the Press. And so he decided at a very young age to go into coaching. That’s why he never had the chance to compete at the Olympics.

We then come back to your 1964 Olympic experience in Tokyo.
I quickly realised I couldn’t get anywhere like the top people because they were evolving in a professional way. In my case, I was training, but I was still working in the family business. I had to. I was married with four kids. I had to feed them. It was hard. It was difficult to accept that even though I considered myself to be as strong as they were, I just couldn’t compete with them. There was something else…

What?
In those days anabolic steroids were just coming in. In 1962, I saw the first symptoms of, I didn’t know honestly, had no idea what steroids were. Before the Commonwealth Games, I was ranked number two. So I was selected as a potential medalist, of course. The number one was a Canadian. I had never met him, but I saw him training. And just by looking at him, I thought something was wrong. This guy was handling weights that just blew me out of the water completely. There was an improvement of 25 kilos or something like that in a matter of months. I just couldn’t believe it. But we took it philosophically. So I competed and finished fifth at the Commonwealth Games. After that, I started to read about it and then found out by Tokyo what it was all about.

What are your best memories from Tokyo?
It was a buzz! To march behind the flag of Australia! To be selected for the Games, we had to be citizens of Australia. So we had to go through the routine of becoming Australian citizens. I had to do it, I did it, and I became an Australian citizen in 1959. And I was very proud of it! Besides that special moment, the most important thing for me was the introduction of professionals like the American basketball Dream Team. I remember going to the bus to welcome them. I knew to play the trumpet and I had brought mine from Australia. So I played some music for them! That perception of professionalism in sports was a turning point in my career.

By Pedro Adrega
IWF Communications

As part of the 120 daily posts published for the IWF’s 120th anniversary, Sam Coffa was portrayed on May 17, 2025 (here)