As a college volleyball player, Pat Boileau was something of a fish out of water.
And while he may not have looked the part in his first-ever official competition at the Senior National Championships in Kelowna, B.C. from May 20-22, the 28-year-old recently crowned Canadian champion is very much in his element when it comes to Olympic weightlifting.
The journey, from A to B, was nothing if not interesting.
A native of Rockland (just outside of Ottawa), Boileau completed his secondary school studies at École secondaire catholique l’Escale, an institution steeped in a culture of elite volleyball. Introduced to the sport in this setting, the ultra-friendly young man would take it a step further, suiting up with the Mavericks club program in the nation’s capital.
“I didn’t have a volleyball build,” said Boileau, who stands roughly 5-10” and weighs in at 225 pounds or so. “I could have played rugby or football. I was an outlier playing volleyball.”
In 2014, he made his way to Sudbury for the first time to enroll in the Health and Fitness Promotion program at Collège Boréal, where his experience playing college volleyball for La Cité in Ottawa served him well coaching in Sudbury.
“Training has always been part of the journey for me,” said Boileau, making the regular trips to the weight room on campus a very natural go-to during that initial two-year stint in the North.
In fact, just before returning home for more studies, the young man registered for an Olympic weightlifting competition at Laurentian University, thinking it was a powerlifting event.
“I had zero experience with Olympic lifting,” Boileau said with a laugh. “I jumped in with two weeks of training — thank you, YouTube!”
Still, there was a natural strength that was evident, even as he made his way back to the Just Lift facility in Ottawa as he pursued even more studies, working his way towards receiving his designation as a registered massage therapist.
“A coach confirmed that I had the potential to compete at a national level and I’ve kind of run with that quote ever since.”
With his background in sport as a motivator, Boileau was again balancing academics and athletics, all while transitioning from a base that included more standard fitness room weight workouts to the more technical approach of his current passion.
“I have a hard time not training for something,” he said. “But it’s not until I finished massage school (March 2019) that I took it to the next level.”
The technique was starting to come around.
“I found the clean and jerk (lift) easier (than the snatch),” recalled Boileau. “I just think that it’s a very raw movement and there’s a lot of transferability to it from other movements that athletes will have done before: a box jump, a drop jump, pretty much any kind of plyometric training.
“The snatch is a much more vulnerable position. People can get kind of scared to get under that bar, but the thrill of knowing what is on the bar and just making a good lift, on the snatch, is a great feeling.”
It’s a feeling Boileau has come to know all too well — but only after completely restructuring the look and feel of his lifts.
“I was too strong for the movement to start,” he said. “My best snatch to start was 200 pounds, but it was a very rough movement. My coach told me that we’ve got to polish this rough diamond.
“We really had to break down my technique to the decimals. It was so, so technical at the beginning, with sprinkles of intensity. This was different for me. When I played college volleyball, they weren’t that concerned that my elbow wasn’t in exactly the right spot, as long as I scored the ball.”
Thankfully, not only did Boileau take well to a highly technical approach, but it also gave him an outlook that provides a wonderful perspective when it comes time to put the end result of hours and hours of training on the line, in front of a crowd on a stage.
“When I got into weightlifting, it was never about competition,” said Boileau. “It was far more about mastering the technical aspects of the movement. The hardest part for me was to learn the technique, and that’s why I fell in love with the sport. I just competed at the national championships and it was six minutes of competition.
“I’m not really driven by the outcome of what happens on the platform, but rather by the process.”
While gym time was hit and miss during the pandemic, this did allow Boileau the time to fine-tune exactly where he fit in with the world of competitive Olympic weightlifting in Canada.
“Early in the pandemic, we decided to focus on controlling my body weight,” he said. “I did some lifting, but more running and watching my diet. I dropped 30 to 40 pounds that I needed to lose to be able to compete at 109 kilos.”
And compete he did, putting together best lifts of 135 kg (snatch) and 185 kg (clean & jerk), finishing with a score of 335.008 in Kelowna, B.C., in May, just ahead of both Thomas Grieve (B.C. - 328.834) and Joshua Posyluzny (AB - 324.297) to claim his first all-Canadian crown.
Interacting with the likes of Olympic gold medal winner Maude Charron and former CFLer turned national champion lifter Quinn Everett was just some of the incredible takeaway for the man who finished third at the Commonwealth Games trials just a few months earlier.
“I think that was cool because it kind of normalized the situation with me winning,” said Boileau. “It’s nice that they don’t take themselves too seriously. We’re all just humans, lifting weights.”
That is the route that he intends to follow, currently taking a very short break from training to help rest the body.
“Then it’s on to qualify for provincials and re-start this journey all over again.”
Randy Pascal is a sportswriter in Greater Sudbury. Pursuit is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.
