KEY POINTS:
At its purest, weightlifting is an individual sport. The competitor stands alone on the platform, chalked hands gripping the bar, knowing it is up to him to hoist the metal load above his head.
Yet the New Zealanders who have qualified to go to the Olympic Games can
say quite honestly and without a hint of false modesty that they are going only because of a team effort.
When they compete in August, Richard Patterson, 24, and Mark Spooner, 23, will reflect on the combined toils and sacrifices others made.
"It's humbling," Patterson said.
The country's premier lifters earned their Beijing tickets when their eight-member New Zealand team won last weekend's Oceania weightlifting championships in Auckland.
Had the team come second or third, only one of them would be going; had they come fourth - a possibility given the tough competition from Australia, Nauru and Samoa - neither would be.
The tension going into the competition was nowhere more palpable than in Patterson's Torbay house - bought for him by his parents to enable him to train full-time - where he flats with team member Cody Cole, 17.
Though a junior, Cole was asked to step up to the senior ranks to win valuable points for the team.
"The week before he said to me, 'I'm going to have to move out if I don't perform'," said Patterson. "He knew how much I wanted it. We've got a massive Athens [Olympics] banner in our flat and he knew he had to do it for me."
Cole obliged handsomely, finishing second in the 62kg division, a major achievement for a junior. Patterson too had his own sacrifices. In the pursuit of more team points, he took the gamble of moving up from his regular 77kg division to the 85kg division.
"By doing so, I gave Mark a possible free shot to get my Olympic spot if we got only one place. I had to do it for the team."
It was a tough decision, and one over which he sought counsel from mentor Tony Ebert, 1974 Commonwealth Games champion. "He was saying, 'All things happen for a reason and if you make a sacrifice, there's karma'," said Patterson.
The gamble paid off when Patterson won the heavier division with a combined snatch/clean and jerk tally of 310kg. Spooner, in the 69kg class, set a new 131kg national record in the snatch and lifted 153kg in the clean and jerk.
Spooner knows all about sacrifices too. The boat-builder has put his career on hold for his sport, working only part-time in front of a computer on boat designs.
"I did it for about four months leading up to the [2006] Commonwealth Games and noticed the difference and realised what I had to do to keep getting better," said Spooner.
He trains in the morning at his Pakuranga home, lifting weights in his garage, then spends most evenings at the Millennium Institute, overseen by coach Richard Dryden. Also based at the institute is national coach Ari Moilanen, a top Finnish lifter and coach, and the sport's high-performance manager, Nigel Avery, double gold medal winner at the 2002 Commonwealth Games.
Patterson and Spooner, who will be aiming for top-16 finishes at Beijing, will gain invaluable experience, just as Avery did at the Sydney Olympics.
The pay-off for Avery came two years later at the Commonwealth Games, and he believes the same will be possible for Patterson and Spooner. "Going to Sydney allowed me to focus and believe in my experience at a top level."
