EBERT SOBS WITH JOY

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33446, 30 January 1974, Page 1

EBERT SOBS WITH JOY

Tony Ebert, the Canterbury middleweight champion and Edinburgh silver medallist, sobbed with joy after he won New Zealand’s first weightlifting gold medal in the James Hay Theatre last evening.

The emotional release he displayed as he shook the hand of the silver medallist, Stanley Bailey (Trinidad), on the victory dais showed how intense is the mental as well as the physical ordeal of international weightlifting.

Fluctuations in yesterday’s contest made the emotional strain more acute. Tension mounted in the second section of the contest the clean and jerk, when

Ebert’s chief rival, John Waterworth, was helped off stage screaming in pain after a leg injury. He failed three times to clean 160 kg and failed to make a total.

At the end of the first round of the snatch lift, Ebert was in third place, behind Bailey and Robert Wrench, of Wales. He had a poor two rounds in the snatch lift and twice missed 122.5kg,a weight well within his capabilities, because he slightly lost balance.

Then came another change of fortune in Ebert’s favour when Bailey, a splendidly powerful lifter, twice failed with 1601 b.

Assured of the gold medal, Ebert then took 162 kg, the biggest lift of the evening, in an attempt on the Games record. In magnificent form, he cleaned the great weight with the most powerful lift of the contest. But when he had the weight across his chest at shoulder level the pressure of the bar against his throat cut off the blood supply to his head and he partly blacked out. He was forced to drop I the bar and appeared momentarily semi-conscious [before getting up from the ! floor.

Ebert won on a body weight count-back from Bailey, a New York policeman.

Yesterday’s triumph was the culmination of eight years of dedicated training since, as a bov of 17, he first handled a bar bell. After the contest, he attributed his win to the eight years of coaching he has had from Mr H. Morrison. who was the coach of the New Zealand weightlifting team at Edinburgh.