Surrey weightlifter Jeenat Billen wanted to fly to Argentina this month, but a numbers game apparently got in the way of her trip to South America.
The 17-year-old is a world-class weightlifter, but she missed out on a chance to compete at the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires.
The International Weightlifting Federation had cleared the way for Billen to compete at the Games, as a “wild card” entry, but Canada’s weightlifting federation and national Olympic committee didn’t make it happen.
The IWF had deemed Jeenat good enough to compete at the Games on her own, without a Canadian weightlifting team represented in Argentina, where the Games were held from Oct. 6 to 18.
Makhan Sandhu, Jeenat’s coach at the Lions weightlifting club in Newton, said the situation was frustrating on a number of levels.
“The Canadian Olympic Committee sent a letter to the individual sports federations asking, ‘Do you have a youth development program?’ and the office secretary of the Canadian Weightlifting Federation mistakenly said, ‘No, we don’t have that.’” Sandhu said. “So the Canadian Olympic Committee said they gave that opportunity, but we have now allocated that spot other another sport with a youth development program. It was an error.”
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Jeenat said she had trained to compete at the Youth Olympics since she started weightlifting at age nine. She followed in the footsteps of her older sister, Helena, also a competitive weightlifter.
“Going to the Youth Olympics was one of my main goals, aside from going to the actual Summer Olympics one day, and it’s really unfortunate I won’t be able to make it this year,” Jeenat said. “It’s frustrating that this type of error does occur. It shouldn’t happen to any athlete, and for me, I’ve met all the standards and I was really close to going, but just because of an error, I missed out.”
A student at Princess Margaret Secondary, Jeenat has earned medals at weightlifting events around the world, including in Malaysia, Columbia and India. Currently, she can “snatch” 84 kilograms, and “clean and jerk” around 105 kgs.
“(Weightlifting) is different and pretty unique, and obviously not something everyone enjoys, but I do,” she said. “Usually in our community, it’s not very common for a girl to get into something like this, weightlifting, you know, but I’m just working toward proving that, like, girls are as good as boys and that we can do anything we set our minds to.”
The setback of not going to the Youth Olympics won’t get in her way of Jeenat’s future goals, she said.
“This is not going to be something that will stop me from weightlifting, and even right after I found out the news, I was still in the gym, still training twice a day, and it’s just going to motivate me to go on to my dream of going to the Olympics one day.”
Sandhu says Jeenat has the talent and drive to get to the biggest stage of international weightlifting competition.
“She’s just a youth, 17, and this year she missed the Junior World Championship, which she qualified for, but we kept her away from that because we wanted her to focus on the youth competitions this year,” Sandhu explained.
“She is frustrated by not making it there (to the Youth Games in Argentina this month), and we are working with her on that,” he added. “We can hope that one day she will be at the Olympics, and the target is 2024, because the 2020 event is too early for her. She can get there if she continues to work, and remains injury-free. She has the talent, all the traits, I mean. She is focused, and the willpower, all those things, to get there.”
tom.zillich@surreynowleader.com
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