From the time she was little, tagging along along with her mom to CrossFit classes, it’s been a love of pushing boundaries for Saskatoon’s Etta Love.
“Every necessary memory for me, I actually have a barbell attached to it ultimately,” said Love.
Nowadays, the 17-year-old can either be present in her family’s garage, which has been changed into a house weightlifting studio, or at Rise Strength Lab, continuing to work on her technique with coach Crystal Derry.
So far, that technique has made her probably the most talented teenaged weightlifters anywhere on the planet.
“I don’t turn into a distinct person after I step onto the platform,” said Love. “I actually have my very own experiences, I actually have my very own emotions and I get to exist on the platform as myself.”
That joy on the platform is something Derry has seen on a weekly basis from Love, who’s pushing towards her first Olympic qualification for Team Canada on the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
“We call it the magic of the platform,” said Derry. “She is that this magical little unicorn, I don’t know what it’s. On the platform really, truly her whole self comes out and it’s really beautiful to witness.”
As a toddler copying the movements of her mom Emma Love within the gym, Etta quickly was in a position to find her passion in weightlifting.
Based on Emma, since then the family has done every little thing they’ll to assist their daughter pursue that zeal and achieve greatness on the world stage.
“She was just fascinated by the movements and witnessing loads of really strong women,” said Emma. “She began fidgeting with a child’s barbell first after which when she was 10, she was allowed to select up the true metal barbell. We got home and she or he said, ‘Mom, after I hold it I feel alive.’”
Just months after celebrating her seventeenth birthday, Love became the primary Canadian woman to set a world record in weightlifting last September on the Junior World Championships in Leon, Spain.
Completing a clean and jerk of 146 kg, it was a lift that the Saskatoon product had been training years for in breaking the world junior record for the over-87-kg division.
“She set the bar down and her face sort of flooded with tears and a smile,” said Emma. “In that moment, it felt just very frozen and magical.”
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The mark of 146 kg was a number which Etta had secretly written down years prior, giving her a goal to trail towards since her training began to take shape over the course of the pandemic.
Slowly, she would allow more people into her world record goal and plenty of supporters were within the room when she made Canadian history in Spain.
“The world record for me since it was something that I had wanted after I was really young, it felt like a promise I had to maintain to myself,” said Etta.
“It felt like something that I knew I needed to try. It wasn’t that I had to attain it, but I knew that I had to maintain that promise.”
Love not only was in a position to turn into the primary Canadian woman to interrupt a world record in the game, but joined Doug Hepburn because the only Canadians to perform the feat when he stood alone within the clean and press within the Nineteen Fifties.
For Derry, it was the culmination of years of labor for the teenaged talent and was something they’d been always constructing towards.
“I actually had persistently visualized her breaking that world record and what that might feel and appear like,” said Derry.
“It was so surreal, but at the identical time it was like I knew it was going to occur.”
Entering 2025, Love is ranked third on this planet in her weight class and is aiming to take that next step from the junior to the senior level.
Despite having a much lighter season in comparison with the calendar in 2024, Love and her family are sorting through some tough decisions with limited funding coming from the national sport organization Weightlifting Canada.
Already paying a significant slice of Etta’s travels equaling 4 trips world wide last yr alone, they’ve needed to cancel their trip to the 2025 Junior World Championships in Peru.
“It was definitely a struggle because there’s not loads of funding and that definitely continues especially as a junior athlete competing at a senior level,” said Etta.
“I suppose the thing that it takes away is that celebration, after I don’t get to compete that’s where I put within the work. That’s where I get to see what I’ve been working towards.”
Based on Emma, those decisions have at all times belonged to her daughter regarding which competitions are vital to her jump to the senior level.
Nonetheless, she said it doesn’t make those conversations any easier.
“I believe this last one was hard because there was a excellent likelihood of her winning junior worlds and I believe she wanted that,” said Emma.
“The way in which she described it to me was that perhaps her ego wanted that, but she knew that her greater goals didn’t need it.”
While Love isn’t competing at Junior Worlds in Peru, she is gearing up for a contest which has much more personal significance for her.
After years of booking flights and accommodations in countries internationally, Love might be competing for gold on the 2025 Canadian Junior Weightlifting Championships in her hometown in June.
She’ll only must drive lower than five minutes away from her family home to the nearby Nutana Curling Club.
“A few of my biggest memories in lifting have been in other countries and have been travelling,” said Etta.
“I believe it’s very meaningful to me that I get to have my next greater competition at home and it gets to be where I actually have friends, family and family members here. That’s very special to me that I get to be here since it’s where I started.”
The potential for wearing the maple leaf in Los Angeles is a thought which Love thinks about each time she sets up her barbell and steps onto a weightlifting platform nowadays.
The chance seems distant in 2028, nevertheless it’s getting closer by the day.
“I get to like weightlifting not because I actually have to, but because I need to,” said Etta. “I believe that’s really motivating me for the Olympics and whatever else.”
