‘It’s just you and the opponent’
Rising wresting star Jacqueline Lew will defend national title next month in Windsor, Ont.
Weighing around 50 kilograms, Jacqueline Lew isn’t especially imposing, but she has always been enormously competitive.
Volleyball, basketball, cross country, track, ballet, hip hop, gymnastics — she was never bored, always active, as a preteen in the years leading up to her Grade 8 year. It was at that point that her mom, Margaret, suggested, “Why not try wrestling?”
For her daughter, the very word conjured up images of WrestleMania, Roman numerals and the huckster-genius of promoter Vince McMahon.
“I had no clue what wrestling was,” Jacqueline says. “What stuck in my mind was WWE. I had never witnessed (an Olympic freestyle) wrestling match before. When I finally did, it was a shock to me. I was horrified by what was going on, the whole idea of physically taking an opponent to the mat and trying to pin them. But I got addicted to the sport in some way. And I’m more and more addicted each day.”
Now 17, the Grade 12 student from Pinetree Secondary School in Coquitlam is a threetime provincial high school champion, the latest title coming at the B.C. tournament earlier this month in Salmon Arm. Lew took gold in the 51-kilo class and was named the event’s outstanding female wrestler for the second time. She did so the first time in Grade 10, when she was B.C. champ in the 47-kilo class, and was a gold medallist again in Grade 11, when she moved up to 54 kilos.
“For me … the appeal is that it’s just you and the opponent,” Lew says. “You may have your coach and team supporting you, but no one controls the outcome except you. It’s pretty common in some (U.S.) states, that don’t have wrestling programs for girls, to wrestle against boys. I have. I don’t really see them as boys, and they really don’t see me as a girl. We just see each other as wrestlers.”
While B.C. grapplers of the opposite sex don’t compete against each other in open competition, that separation gets tossed out in training. That’s when Lew and Kye Mills, the provincial boys champ at 51 kilos and also a Pinetree student, get down for a Battle Royale.
“They duke it out, they go at it, it’s spectacular wrestling,” says Pinetree head coach Bill Adair.
A girl with a headlock on a promising future, Lew didn’t get serious about wrestling until Grade 9, her first year at Pinetree, after being introduced to the sport at Summit Middle School. Competing for Pinetree in the high school season, working with the Coast Wrestling Club and now the Burnaby Mountain Wrestling Club year-round, she has trained, competed and won at age-group tournaments in Peru, Bosnia, Romania, Spain, Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, using seed money from crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe.
She has dispatched high school opponents with frightening efficiency, taken on collegiate wrestlers and stood her ground against young alpha males in competitions in the U.S.
“She’s the whole package,” Adair says. “Jackie has the body type, the mental toughness, the explosiveness, the ability to train hard. She’s gone from zero to 60 almost instantaneously. You wouldn’t imagine in a million years, this pretty, super-smart, 5-foot-2-inch girl with a beautiful smile could pick you up and toss you across a room.”
Since one of Wrestling Canada’s high-performance training centres is at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, the well travelled Lew is sticking close to home when she attends university as a first-year student this fall. Simon Fraser’s Carol Huynh took Canada’s first gold medal of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the 48-kilo class. Another SFU and Burnaby Mountain Wrestling Club alumnus, Daniel Igali, won Canada’s first gold in Olympic wrestling at the 2000 Games in Sydney.
“We have a history here (SFU, Burnaby Mountain),” says Dave McKay, a two-time Olympian, five-time Olympic coach and high-performance coach for B.C. “We really can’t guarantee that anybody will be an Olympic champion, but there’s a proven pathway to success here. Jacqueline has a real natural feel for the sport. It’s something you can’t teach. We certainly feel it’s something we can expand on. Definitely, our high-performance program has identified her as one of the young stars. All we can guarantee is that she’ll get the best opportunity to reach her goals.”
Up next? Lew defends the national title at the 2017 Canadian juvenile (high-school) championships in Windsor, Ont., in early April.