When it comes to Vietnam’s sporting heroes, the weightlifter Hoang Anh Tuan is worth his weight in gold.

Weightlifter Hoang Anh Tuan.

When the Vietnamese weightlifter Hoang Anh Tuan returned to Bac Ninh province after winning a silver medal at the Beijing Olympic Games he was hailed like a returning conquering hero. But one 75-year-old woman villager couldn’t help laughing. She remembered Tuan as the “Minsk motorcycle boy” as years ago he used to burn around on his noisy two-stroke Belarusian motorbike collecting money for his mother who worked as a butcher at the village market.

“You’re the Minsk boy aren’t you? Oh my! How strong you are now,” she said. “The whole village is celebrating your success.”
Tuan’s path to fame was strewn with difficulties. Born under in the year of the buffalo, Vietnamese people believe Tuan was destined to be hard-working. As his father had moved to the south to find work, Tuan was aware of his duties and responsibilities as the eldest son in a fatherless family.

At first he walked around the village collecting cash owed to his mother but then he acquired his Minsk. Soon the whole town knew him to see as his bike belched blue smoke out of the exhaust.

Tuan was always fond of sport and he particularly liked wrestling which is a specialty sport in his homeland. In the daytime he went to collect his mother’s money and went to a wrestling school in the late afternoon. Then one summer afternoon in 1997, Pham Quang, a coach from Tu Son Physical Training and Sports University, came to town.

Quang was on the hunt for fresh talent to start a weightlifting programme and when he spotted Tuan gambling with his friends he immediately noticed that the young man had the perfect build for lifting dumbbells.

Tuan was more than willing to try his hand at weightlifting and enrolled in a course. While Vietnamese people are not famous worldwide for weightlifting, Tuan would have known of the SEA Games champion weightlifter Nguyen Quoc Thanh, who hailed from Hanoi and was dubbed ‘the Hanoi elephant’. Thanh was the pride of the country but nobody had filled the void that he left behind.

Tuan showed great determination and perseverance as he trained. Nothing happens overnight in the world of weightlifting. He might have been born with the right build but he still had to push himself through countless punishing sessions to become an Olympian.

Quang, who eventually became deputy director of the training centre, worked with Tuan closely in later years, helping him pick up all the skills a weightlifting champion needs. The main trick is down to mobilising and controlling all your emotions and all muscular power and pouring it into an explosion of strength. It is truly an exact science that requires maximum concentration and perfectly timed technique.

Tuan had his troubles on the road to Beijing. At the national sports meet in 2002 Hoang Anh Tuan he was defeated by Do Van Quyen of Hanoi after setting his sights on breaking the national record. Even though he pipped Quyen in the snatch and lift category he had to settle for silver medal overall. Brokenhearted, he locked himself in the changing rooms and refused to speak with anyone.

In 2004, at the Asian Youth Games held in Thailand, Tuan won gold though the elation of victory was tempered somewhat by the fact China had not sent its top athletes. But plenty of people believed Tuan was set for greatness. Before departing for the 15th Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, in 2006, the athlete Nguyen Hong Minh, said, “Hoang Anh Tuan is a wonder of Vietnam’s sport. He is our No 1 hope to win gold for Vietnam.”

In the end he had to settle for a silver medal again. He was beaten by Le Zheng, a Chinese athlete. Months later Tuan still could not help picturing the triumphant air of his Chinese rival and despairing. Tuan noted that Le Zheng was shorter by 3-4 centimetres and more muscular than him. As a general rule in weightlifting, if two men are of the same weight the one who is taller will be at a slight disadvantage as the path of the weight he is lifting is longer.

At the world championships in 2006, just before the Asian Games, at a warm-up event Le Zheng had won gold for lifting 280kg overall in both categories — clean lift, jerk and snatch– while Tuan got a bronze for his total of 276 kg.

Even though Tuan had lost again he made progress as at the Doha games, he lifted 285kg, which five months earlier would have been a world record. However Le Zheng had also improved and won gold with a combined of lift 287 kg.

Of course, Tuan was happy to have won a silver medal, but he also longed to go one better even though he admitted his rival was in better shape and had better training facilities at his disposal.

Nevertheless Tuan continued to train, hoping that at the Beijing Olympic Games 2008 he would have one more chance to compete against Le Zheng.
During the Beijing Olympics he had the honour of meeting the President of State Nguyen Minh Triet who wished him well and said that Tuan was Vietnam’s number one hope.

But competing against the world’s best weightlifters in the 56kg category, Tuan was pipped by another athlete from China and had to settle for a silver medal. He was still a national hero as the first Vietnamese medal winner since Tran Hieu Ngan won silver in Sydney 2000.

Now Tuan will continue to work at achieving new goals. He is busy preparing for the Southeast Asian Games 2009 in Laos. He also recently invested more than VND1 billion ($57,300) in a 200sqm-physical education club for weightlifters with billiards tables, table tennis tables, a sports store and a café on the second floor. Hopefully this will be the cradle for the next generation of Vietnamese weightlifting Olympians. The Minsk boy has done good.

VietNamNet/Timeout