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Nova Scotia athletes receive special training from ‘Queen of Olympic Weightlifting’ at Crossfit Hubtown
Ursula Garza Papandrea, former two-time national champion and record-holding weightlifter, headed up a weekend workshop to help women improve technique.
There was a lot of heavy lifting done this weekend as a former national champion stopped into Truro for a weightlifting seminar.
Ursula Garza Papandrea, former twotime national champion and record-holding weightlifter, took over Crossfit Hubtown to head the first Women in Weightlifting workshop, which focused on helping participants fine tune their lifting techniques.
“We had two levels of groups during this workshop, beginner and intermediate,” said Papandrea.
“The beginner group worked on the progressions to improve execution and how to properly lift, while the intermediate group worked on specialized exercises focusing on technique correction to help deal with different aspects of how they lift.”
Papandrea began competing in 1987, becoming one of the first women to test her skills at the international level of weightlifting. From there, she won two senior national championships, two Olympic Festival championships, made the World team five times and broke numerous records in both snatch and clean-and-jerk categories.
She has also gone on to coach in the U.S., making her the first and only woman Senior International Coach.
“Ursula herself was kind of a founding mother, you could say, for women in weightlifting,” said Amanda Thompson, owner of Crossfit Hubtown and VP of administration for the Nova Scotia Weight Lifting Association.
“We brought her here to interact with female athletes ages 13 to 50 to hopefully inspire them to continue to pursue greatness in the sport. She was one of the first females to be able to compete internationally, and the experience she has shared with us from her time competing is amazing.”
The workshop, which ran Friday to Sunday, is the first of its kind to be hosted by the Nova Scotia Weight Lifting Association and aims to not only get more women interested in competing, but also open them up to the idea of coaching as well.
“Provincially, we’ve seen a huge growth in female athletes, but we’re still very under represented from the coaching and officials side of things,” said Thompson.
“We’re hoping through events like this though, we can inspire people to pursue those positions. We would like to see this become an annual event to allow women to come together and train.”
While Papandrea is no stranger to coaching, she was surprised by the level of athleticism participants of the workshop already had.
“They were remarkably adept,” she said. “I was really impressed by the development of the athletes, their technique and by what they’ve already been taught before coming into this. I would say they are probably better than most of the USAW participants I coach.”
The workshop itself, the first all-women workshop Papandrea has hosted in North America, may have focused primarily on building technique, but she hopes the athletes will take a bit more out of it than that.
“I hope they not only improve, but that they take away an experience that gives them confidence,” she said.
“Hopefully I’ve encouraged them to see that with work, persistence and perseverance, it doesn’t matter what the status quo is. We can change that.”