Strong arm of the Law

Published on Sunday 21 July 2002 01:00

KIRSTIE Law IS only ever concerned with putting weight on - stacks of it, at either end of the steel bar that she heaves above her head. Instead of the quaint Weightwatchers-style analogies about meagre 2lb bags of sugar, Law deals in tons, as she pumps iron every day, 18 tons in a week, 360-times her own bodyweight. Someone once pointed out that it is the equivalent of pushing two double decker buses over her head every week. Hold very tight now.

"All I ever seem to get now is, ‘How many buses have you lifted today, Kirstie?’," she says, smiling to show that the jibe does not yet grate with her.

Law, 24, from Glasgow, is one of Scotland’s best medal chances at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, where weightlifting for women is being contested for the first time. Eighth in this year’s European championships and ranked eighth in the Commonwealth, it will not be until she gets to Manchester (leaving by train - rather than bus - with the Scotland team tomorrow) that she will discover whether ranked opponents have arrived andwhich weight category they will be competing in.

"Nigeria are banned, and there is a Nigerian girl who is top of the lists, the Canadian isn’t coming, and there is an Indian and Australian who might be in different weights," she says, having carefully studied the form.

Not that Law is taking her chance of a medal in Manchester for granted as she tries to shrug the expectations from her well-defined shoulders. "The thought is in the back of my mind, but I try to block it out and concentrate on my training," she says.

"Medals depend on what others lift, and I can’t control that. I know what I hope to do; if it’s good enough, great. My focus is just on getting a personal best. If I do that, then great, where I finish is irrelevant."

What she hopes to do will be a Scottish record. It is inevitable. All her competitions invariably involve breaking records, and from Day One, they have been her own records that she has improved.

"Every time I set a personal best, it’s a Scottish record - so I’ve no idea how many records I have broken since I started.

"I’d been lifting only for two months, but I beat everyone in my first event. I was shocked, but since then I’ve just kept nudging the records up," she says.

"The first Scottish records I set were at 45 and 65kg," she says, talking of the two lifts: the snatch, where the bar is levered dynamically from the ground to go straight above the head in one movement; and the clean and jerk, where the bar is powered upwards to under the chin as the lifter stands up, pausing before powering the bar overhead. The two lifts comprise separate competitions and have the weight totals added together for the overall title. Thus Law, one-third of the otherwise male Scottishweightlifting team, has three chances of winning medals.

Three years into her career, and competing for Britain at the European championships in Turkey earlier this year, she snatched a British best of 65kg, cleaned a Scottish record 80kg and thus established a Scottish record total of 145kg.

Through her teens, Law had been a track athlete, a sprinter and hurdler good enough to win the Scottish Schools’ title and regularly make the finals at the Western District championships. But to her dismay, she was never quite good enough to make an impact nationally.

"I’d worked particularly hard and was getting nowhere," she says. "It was frustrating. There were several nights of tears, before I decided to take a break from athletics." Her track coach, Bob Somerville, suggested that Law should continue to train while taking her break from the track. Before long, under guidance from Raymond Cavanagh, himself a veteran of the 1994 Commonwealth Games, she was lifting weight competitively.

"I don’t miss athletics at all," she says. "I’ve had fewer injuries lifting than when running."

Ah, yes. Injuries. Law may have had fewer injuries, but her new sporting career was nearly finished before it had started with a back injury which saw her unable to train for nearly seven months, and which has seen her make the sacrifice of dropping her career as a physiotherapist.

"I wasn’t even using weights at the time. I was at an assessment weekend, working with a chiropractor. He made a sharp movement, and I felt something give in my back.

"When I woke the next morning, I couldn’t move. I thought I’d never be able to lift again. Only when I saw an osteopath at a private clinic did I get anywhere. He fixed it in about six weeks, but I was out for seven months, and had to give up physiotherapy. When you are dealing with patients, you can’t be thinking all the time about your posture and the position your body is in."

Instead, Law now works with other elite Scottish competitors as a conditioning coach at the West of Scotland Sports Institute at Easterhouse, part of the national network of the Scottish Institute of Sport.

"The job is fantastic," says the woman who still manages to fit nine two-hour training sessions in each week.

Law says that, despite the novelty aspect of being a woman weightlifter, the only people she gets stick from are other weightlifters - men weightlifters.

"Men seem to think it’s all very funny. They think that the weights that we lift are really light," Law says. "It’s a bit like the attitude in football towards women’s football.

"But that tends just to be men weightlifters. If you say to a man who is interested in sport generally that’s you’re a weightlifter, they’re generally quite interested and respectful.

"I think that’s why I’ve had so much attention this time, because it is a new sport. But when they meet me people are always surprised. I guess they expect me to be massive or something."

Law’s size and shape is something of a bug bear to her - but not in the Weightwatchers sense. At 5ft 6in and right at the 53kg weight limit, no matter how hard she tries, nor how hard she trains, Law cannot gain a pound in bodyweight.

"No matter how much I eat, I can’t put weight on," she says. "I eat anything and everything. In Turkey it was a buffet. I’d my plate piled high, then back for five cakes. The other girls just couldn’t believe it."

Maybe she should let Weightwatchers know.

• Did you know?

The Commonwealth Games are the largest multi-sports event in which Scotland competes as a nation under its own flag. In 1997 results of a poll carried out on behalf of the Scottish Sports Council revealed that the Commonwealth Games rated alongside the Olympics and the football World Cup as the sporting events most Scots would like to see our sportsmen or women succeed in.