San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
From Tonga to Tokyo, via S.F.’s Hunters Point
A few years ago, Kuinini “Nini” Manumua was just a kid from a family that was struggling, attending a big urban high school, without any thought of the Olympics.
Today? She’s a seasoned world traveler and is packing her bags for Tokyo, where she will make history.
“There’s a potential Nini at every comprehensive public high school,” said Lincoln’s football, track and weightlifting coach Kevin Doherty. “All they need is access.”
And someone like Doherty to discover the
Ninis of the world and provide that access. Manumua was born in American Samoa but spent the first 10 years of her life in her parents’ home country of Tonga. There, she and her younger siblings played outdoors and roamed around, watched over by her huge extended family.
But when she was 10, her parents and siblings moved to San Francisco, settling first in the Oakdale housing projects and then to another development in Hunters Point.
“It was really sketch,” Manumua said of when she first got to San Francisco. “It was a little scary. I had to stay inside be
cause it was too dangerous to go outside. My parents had to find jobs to provide for us, so I had to take care of my siblings and cook for them and make sure they were safe.”
Manumua was a natural athlete, playing basketball and volleyball and running track. When she was a freshman at Lincoln, she started weightlifting in an afterschool program.
“I hated lifting,” she said. “I dreaded it.”
But Doherty, who had built a highly competitive weightlifting program and had sent several Lincoln athletes to junior nationals and worlds, saw a potential star.
“I told her on Day 1 that she could go the world championships,” he said.
And with Doherty’s encouragement, Manumua kept getting better. By the end of her freshman year, after just a few months of lifting, she went to the youth nationals and won.
“Somewhere along the line, I started liking it,” she said.
Manumua was still playing volleyball and competing in shot put and discus in track and field. When she was 17, she made the youth world weightlifting team. In her first international competition, she earned bronze.
“That’s when I thought, ‘I could potentially be pretty good,’ ” she said.
While he was coaching an athlete in Rio, someone suggested to Doherty that Manumua might have a path to the Olympics if she represented Tonga. When he returned from Brazil, he proposed that to Manumua. In 2018, the same year she graduated high school, she made the country switch as Olympic qualification got under way.
“I never thought I could represent Tonga,” Manumua said. “It’s such a blessing.”
While she was training during the pandemic, she caught a clean and jerk wrong and heard a pop in her knee. A scan showed a hairline fracture across her patella. The COVID shutdown gave her time to heal, and she is now lifting painfree. She and her younger sister set up a makeshift gym in her aunt and uncle’s San Bruno backyard, using weights that Doherty brought them from school, so that they could lift while gyms were closed.
When the first preliminary list for Olympic berths was released this spring, Manumua was on it. But when New Zealand transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard made the Olympics in the superheavyweight category, there was some outrage that Hubbard’s inclusion came at the expense of an Oceania regional slot for Manumua. Suddenly Manumua’s name started showing up as a cause celebre in right wing media.
But on July 1, while in the airport on the way to a collegiate weightlifting competition in Detroit, Manumua got the news that she had received a tripartite invitation — a kind of wild card Olympic berth for underrepresented countries.
“It was so exciting,” she said. “I was crying, I was so happy.”
She doesn’t look at social media and isn’t interested in learning about how she has been used as fodder in the Hubbard controversy.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “I want to focus on myself and my lifting. I don’t care about what my competitors are doing.”
Manumua will be accompanied to Tokyo by Ben Hwa, an assistant coach who has been working with her for years. Weighing about 240 pounds, she will be the smallest in her competition, and snatches more than her body weight: 110 kilos, or 242 pounds. For the clean and jerk, it’s 135 kilos, close to 300 pounds. Her goal at the Olympics is to break the 300pound barrier.
She will be the first female weightlifter for Tonga.
“It’s amazing,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of representation for women.”
Currently studying business at San Francisco State, she is on track to be the first in her family to get a college degree. She hopes to get her contractor’s license to help her father launch a construction business. She also is trying to decide when to go on her Mormon mission. Her younger brother Sikot, who was a standout football player at Lincoln, is on his mission in Alaska.
“For boys it’s mandatory, but girls can choose if they want to go,” Manumua said. “My mom never did one, and it’s something she regrets to this day. I don’t want to have any regrets or missed opportunities, with church or school.
“Or weightlifting.”
The weightlifting opportunity is about to happen. A first for Tonga and more importantly, a first for Manumua. All she needed was the opportunity.