Jo Calvino On…Early Days in Weightlifting and Her Journey
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Jo Calvino on…early days in weightlifting and her journey November 18, 2014 Our new trustee, British weightlifting legend Jo Calvino, talks to us about her life, career, the state of weightlifting in England and what’s next for her. In the second of a series of five articles, Jo talks to us about her early days of weightlifting and the journey she has had in the sport. Early days of weightlifting When you train as a diver you are in the gym a lot and that is where the Crystal Palace Weightlifting Club, British and England Weightlifting coach Keith Morgan first saw me and some potential, he spoke with Lindsay Fraser, my last diving coach, and asked if he could get me to try it. I thought I would try it and if I didn’t like it, fair enough, but Keith said if I don’t try it, then there could be an opportunity missed. So I dragged Anthony along and tried it. I then stopped everything. I had found weightlifting. I had found where I fitted in and belonged. I was a weightlifter. Three weeks after I tried lifting for the first time I went to the Metropolitan Police Championships and lifted as a guest. I enjoyed it. I weighed in at 42.95kg for the 46kg competition. A lot of the weightlifting girls had been lifting for a long time and I was the first junior to come along for a while so a lot of people were saying ‘you’re so cute’ and it was really nice because diving can be quite bitchy as a girl. The funny thing was though a diver I was deemed big, but in weightlifting I was deemed small. In February 1994 I made the decision to solely focus on weightlifting, ‘retiring’ from diving to concentrate on it. I was 13 years old. Keith told me that if I wanted to get good I needed to get some specialist weightlifting boots and my Mum said OK. Weightlifting then became serious, I focussed on it and it then escalated for me – it was a nice environment for me to be in. Every competition Keith entered me in was a “small competition” in his own words. He always used to tell me to enjoy it and that took the pressure off. I then qualified for the London Women’s Championships in February 1994. I was at Crystal Palace and I broke a couple of London records. It was at that point that Keith sat me and my Mum down and said that with more concentration and training I could become really good at the sport. I had already qualified for the British Senior Championships and the progress was quite rapid. I was so young and had to quickly learn to integrate with different age and cultural groups. There’s guys here at the Crystal Palace Weightlifting Club now who are 60-70 years old and when I first came here I was 13 and I don’t think I actually spoke to anyone for a few years as I was so nervous – a shy teenager. The other lifters used to wind me up to see if I would bite and I never did but when I did once they were all shocked. Now they can’t shut me up! That period taught me a lot about how to look after myself and protect myself – I have quite a sharp tongue nowadays. The weightlifting journey Weightlifting has been a journey for me, not a career. Following the London Women’s Championships in February 1994 I was invited to join the GB women’s senior squad. In British terms I was young, but women’s weightlifting wasn’t in the Commonwealth Games or Olympics and back then there were not any youth competitions – all I could lift in then were junior championships. It is completely different nowadays though. When I joined up with the GB squad there was one other girl in my age range, a year older than me, but through diving I was used to travelling away and being away from my parents, plus Keith was one of the GB Women Coaches, so it was familiarity for me. The youngest woman other than Michaela Breeze was Sharon Oakley, who was 10 years older than me. At 13 years old the age difference between me and a 23-year-old was a lot. Most of the group were mid-to-late 20- 30s; very confident, strong-minded women. A lot of them came from London and they took me under their wing. I was a tiny thing and they were very sisterly towards me and made me feel really welcome; they knew it was the next generation coming through in their sport. I won my first international honour just over a year after starting the sport in 1995 at the U16 Junior Schoolboys and Schoolgirls Championships and then I went to the Junior World Championships in Warsaw, Poland in 1996 – all whilst I was studying for my GCSEs. Luckily, my school; St John Rigby College, in West Wickham, south-east London loved sport and arranged for me to adapt my day around training and competitions. I would get called into the Headmistress’ office during lessons and all my friends would be ‘oooh, Jo is going to get told off’ but all she wanted to know was how my training was going. Without my knowledge, Keith used to send my medals to the school and they would be presented at assembly to me and I would be so embarrassed. Our school had Michael Carberry (cricket player for Surrey, Kent and England) who was two years above me and the twins Darren Langley and Stuart Langley who boxed at the Commonwealth Games for England. Back then weightlifting was very separated between male and female squads and I got invited to a European U17s championships and joined up with the squad at Bisham Abbey – it came at the same time as the senior squads were announced too. I didn’t know anyone but Bisham Abbey was the home of weightlifting and such a nice place to go to. It’s so special. We got told a story that the heads which were chopped off at the Tower of London were brought to Bisham and buried under the accommodation blocks where we were staying, so you can imagine the stories we had there. Apparently Anne Boleyn was buried there too and the story was that if you see her going across the grounds a night you were lucky. I didn’t ever see her, but we sat up one night back then to see her but never did – it did have that eerie creepiness though and felt spooky. Active Communities Network staff in the London office watching Jo lift at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. I remember sitting at a competition once and Keith telling me it was just a little competition but I picked up the programme and it said ‘British Senior Championships’. I said to him ‘this isn’t a small competition and I was panicking’. He told me to absorb the environment and enjoy it. I finished 2nd or 3rd. They were hoping to put women’s weightlifting into the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur but it wasn’t successful, so all we had to compete for were the Junior World Championships, the Junior European Championships and the EU Championships – a senior event. As a junior it was tough and we always had to pitch ourselves at a senior level. I started to do those juniors tournaments. In 1998/99 it was then announced that women’s weightlifting was successful for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester and so began a big drive over the next four years to be part of the first-ever women’s weightlifting team at a Commonwealth Games and one that was in England. Along the way I won my first British Seniors in 1996, I was 15. I was getting into the mix, but still very laid back, because it isn’t professional now and wasn’t back then. However, the competition heated up as a lot of the girls who were going to retire then kept going after that announcement; everyone wanted to be part of the history. .