Weightlifter Cikamatana in tears after finishing fourth
Eileen Cikamatana was in tears and her coach Paul Coffa is reconsidering retirement after she fell short of their lofty Olympic weightlifting goals.
Coffa had confidently predicted the 24-year-old would win a medal, but the Fijian-born Cikamatana underperformed in the clean and jerk and finished fourth.
Norwegian Solfrid Koanda won gold on Sunday in the 81kg class with an Olympic record total of 275kg.
Koanda’s final clean and jerk lift of 154kg also broke the Olympic mark.
“It’s pretty disappointing not to be on the podium. But it happens – we have good days, we have bad days,” Cikamatana said of her Olympic debut
“It was just a bad day, especially in the clean and jerk. It was not my day.
“We’ve worked so hard to be where we are today. But it’s life, I can’t say much about it … I didn’t deliver.”
Cikamatana said Coffa, who coached Dean Lukin to Australia’s only Olympic weightlifting gold medal in 1984, is like a father to her.
“I’m pretty disappointed not giving him a medal, even though we’ve come a long, long way,” she said.
“No-one can coach me the way he does. I might pull him back, you never know.”
Similarly, Coffa said she is like a daughter and said it was “crazy” that she was so disappointed for him.
Cikamatana left Fiji and changed nationalities in 2019 so she could keep working with Coffa and his wife Lilly.
They were working with Cikamatana when she won Commonwealth Games gold for Fiji in 2018 and she also won gold for Australia in Birmingham.
Coffa’s 10th Olympics was supposed to be his last but when asked after the event if that was the case, he had a long pause.
As the interview continued, Coffa increasingly sounded like someone who has one more Olympic campaign in him.
“I can’t do that to a young girl. She has so much ahead of her – she’s brilliant,” he said.
“I’m not going to let her go. We’ll hang around together for a while longer.
“It’s very hard to take, because I know how brilliant she is. She has the ingredients to be the greatest female weightlifting in the world … she has to bring it out.
“Do another Los Angeles – we’ll see what happens.”
Asked what went wrong, Coffa said Cikamatana “just dropped the ball … it’s a good lesson for her”.
Egyptian Sara Ahmed also cried in disappointment after finishing second with 268kg, while Neisi Dajomes of Ecuador lifted a total of 267kg for third.
Cikamatana, who had lifted more than 150kg for the clean and jerk in training and competition, could not complete her last two lifts at 149kg and finished on 145.
That gave her total of 262kg after she was well-placed at fourth in snatch on 117kg.
#Weightlifter #Cikamatana #tears #finishing #fourth