For all the heavy-handed climate-change messaging of the opening ceremony at the Maracanã Stadium, replete with dancing trees, the symbolic distribution of seedlings to all competitors and the projection of gloomy videos documenting the threat of rising sea levels, it took the endearing antics of a dancing weightlifter from a country few had heard of to truly place the issue of global warming centre stage at the Olympics in Rio.
The central Pacific republic of Kiribati, until 1979 a British colony, is a collection of 33 coral atolls about as far from anywhere as it’s possible to be. Peer at it on Google Earth, as if from space, and it’s surrounded by nothing but the vastness of the ocean. The south-western coast of the United States, more than 5,300 kilometres away, is the nearest significant land mass. In the other direction, Australia’s east coast is 6,300km distant. The naming of its settlements mixes influences from distinctly colonial/western (London, Paris, Poland) to unmistakably desert island (Banana).
The Pacific is threatening to wipe the low-lying island country off the map, as millions of TV viewers around the world now know, thanks to David Katoatau, a contagiously cheerful citizen of Kiribati, who while lifting his way into the hearts of sports fans everywhere, simultaneously raised global awareness of the plight of his homeland.
As flag-bearer for Kiribati’s team of three, the short, stocky Katoatau danced his way onto the Olympic stage in Maracanã, executed a faintly disturbing routine after every lift during the competition – described by one newspaper in a pun on the weightlifting discipline clean-and-jerk as “clean and twerk” – and half-danced, half-skipped off stage to resounding applause after coming sixth in his weightlifting category.
Here was a man made for social media – Twitter went crazy for the underdog with a fun way of delivering a solemn message.
Katoatau should have been instantly forgettable as just another also-ran competitor in the grand Olympic scheme of things, but intrigued journalists sought him out, and he improbably managed to steal a sizeable share of the spotlight that was shining on the likes of high-profile multiple medal-winners such as Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt.
Katoatau was born on July 17, 1984, on Nonouti, Kiribati. In 2001, at the age of 16, he moved to Fiji, where Paul Coffa, an Australian coach from the tiny island republic of Nauru, had just set up the Oceania Weightlifting Institute.
This was a vital step because Kiribati lacked any form or gym or training facility. “There was no gym when I started training as a boy and there is no gym now,” Katoatau told Reuters. “I trained on the beach in the open sun. The bar would become too hot to touch, so I had to train at 6am.”
Katoatau was one of the first youngsters to join Coffa’s programme, and still lives at the institute in its current home in Nouméa, New Caledonia, where he trains with Coffa.
Katoatau’s first high-profile international competition was the 2007 World Weightlifting Championships in Thailand, where he came 37th in the 85-kilogram division, the fifth of weightlifting’s eight body-weight categories.
Competition weightlifters must do two types of lift: the snatch, in which the barbell must be raised overhead from the floor in a single motion; and the clean and jerk, in which it’s lifted first to the chest, then above the head. The two weights successfully lifted are added up. Katoatau’s total in Thailand was 281kg.
Unsurprisingly for a nation with a population of about 100,000, Kiribati doesn’t produce many sporting stars. Katoatau became a hero overnight. The following year, he was the national flag-bearer at the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, where his much-improved lift of 313kg put him in 15th place.
On the smaller stage of regional competitions, Katoatau has lifted six gold medals, six silvers and three bronzes. When he won the 94kg category at the Oceania Olympic qualifying championships in Samoa in 2012, with 330kg, he became the first I-Kiribati, as the islanders are known, to win a place at an Olympic Games on merit, rather than via an invitation.
At the Olympics in London in 2012, he was once again Kiribati’s flag-bearer, but failed by 5kg to match his qualifying lift, and finished 17th out of 21 in the 94kg category.
His career highlight to date – and one of the first appearances of his now-famous dance routine – came in Glasgow in 2014, when he made history for Kiribati, igniting a craze for weightlifting in the process, by taking its first Commonwealth Games medal in any sport. Putting on weight to advance to the 105kg category, Katoatau snatched gold with a combined lift of 348kg. Back home, stamps were printed in his honour; throughout Oceania, youngsters flocked to gyms.
By now, dance had become a central part of his performance, and attracted much global media attention in Glasgow. Offstage, Katoatau even picked up a guitar and threw in the odd song for the cameras, but global warming had yet to become part of the routine. “I like dancing and singing,” was his only explanation for the extrovert behaviour at the time. But that would soon change.
Last year, Katoatau watched a report on CNN from the Cop21 climate talks in Paris, and was startled to see experts were predicting that within the next 30 years low-lying Kiribati would probably be the first country on Earth to be wiped off the map by rising sea levels.
The problem wasn’t news to Katoatau or anyone else from Kiribati – coastal homes were already being inundated, and in 2014, the government had announced it was buying land 3,220km away in Fiji as a lifeline for its population. In February this year, a team from the UAE visited Kiribati at the invitation of its government to explore the possibility of constructing artificial islands, in the style of The Palm Jumeirah, to replace land lost to the sea.
In 2014, Katoatau had used the 11,000 Australian dollars (Dh31,131) awarded to him by his government for his historic Commonwealth win to build a humble house – a traditional “tebuia” hut – next to his parents’ home on Tarawa, the most populated of Kiribati’s atolls and islands. Shortly afterwards, it was destroyed by a cyclone.
Witnessing the plight of his homeland graphically set out on TV spurred Katoatau into action. Hoping to exploit his newfound international fame, he composed a powerful open letter with the title “Save our country”, which was distributed by his coach at a meeting of the Commonwealth Games Federation. “Every day my people fear for their lives as their homes are lost to the rising sea,” he wrote. “We have nowhere to climb and nowhere to run to … I am begging you to save us.”
Looking forward to competing in Rio, he wrote of the schools he had visited in his home country and “the thousands of children I have met [who] aspire to be something great. How do I lie to them and say their dreams are possible when our nation is disappearing?”
Kiribati, he said, lacked the resources to save itself, and he begged “the countries of the world to see what is happening”. The threat of rising sea levels was real and “we will be the first to go … open your eyes and look to the other low-lying level islands around the Pacific – they will soon fall with us.” In the not too distant future, he concluded, “we will all drown”.
At 32, Katoatau still has a bright competitive future ahead. Lifting 349kg at Rio, he ranked 14th overall, 82kg behind Uzbek gold-medal winner Ruslan Nurudinov, but bettered his own Commonwealth Games gold lift by 1kg. Now his sights are set on defending his Commonwealth crown on the Gold Coast, Australia in 2018, and has longer-term plans to join Coffa’s institution as a coach. But the outlook for the young country born five years before him is less rosy.
“Most people don’t know where Kiribati is,” Katoatau told Reuters in Rio. “I want people to know more about us, so I use weightlifting, and my dancing, to show the world.”
But unless global warming and rising sea levels are brought under control, within a generation, there may be nothing of Kiribati left for the world to see.
The red, white, blue and yellow flag that Katoatau paraded so proudly around Rio’s Maracanã Stadium – a depiction of a lone seagull flying over a featureless, sunlit sea – may prove to be horribly prophetic, despite the best efforts of Kiribati’s most famous son.
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