Paul Coffa fondly remembers a conversation at the Los Angeles Olympics, when he was casually asked what Dean Lukin would do the next day.
“Win gold,” was the long-time Australian coach’s blunt reply.
Forty years after Lukin won Australia’s only weightlifing gold medal at the Games, Coffa has the same enthusiasm about Eileen Cikamatana.
The 24-year-old will make her Olympic debut from midnight on Saturday (AEST) in the 81kg class.
“To win gold at the Olympics, you have to be special. They have something extra, what you require, and she has (it),” Coffa told AAP.
“Commitment – the ability, the commitment, the win-at-all-cost, she has that.
“After eight years, two Commonwealth Games, she’s just win at all costs.
“Just the way she was, she was only a young girl, 14-15, she had what I wanted – the aggression was there, ‘I want to do it, I want to lift’ – and she never stopped.”
Cikamatana was born and raised in Fiji, where she started in the sport as a teenager and met Coffa and his wife Lilly.
She won gold for Fiji at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, but switched to Australia in 2019 to continue working with the Coffas.
A dispute between rival bodies in Fijian weightlifting prompted her move.
Cikamatana was ineligible to compete at the Tokyo Olympics, but in Birmingham she became the first woman to win individual gold medals for two countries at the Commonwealth Games.
Apart from the difficulties around the move to Australia, Cikamatana has also overcome a serious leg injury that forced her to miss two world championships.
“She wants this. Anyone with an injury like that would have said ‘that’s it’. But she kept coming and kept coming,” Coffa said.
“She trains diligently, she knows what she’s doing.
“There has never been a problem – not once, she said ‘no, i don’t want to do it’.
“The biggest thing is, she has the clean and jerk, like Dean Lukin. The clean and jerk is what we call the winning lift. At the end, you wait and if you really have it – she’s got it,” he said.
