Most people use their basement to store stuff. Maybe for a TV room or a workshop. Wes Woo used his basement to create champions.
Rarely has a home basement been more significant in Canadian sport than when Wes lived on Vancouver’s West 38th Avenue in the late 1960s. Wes built a training gym in his basement and it was there he founded the Spartak Weightlifting Club in 1969, the first weightlifting club in BC. Spartak produced 15 national champions and six Olympians. And that’s just part of the story of how Wes became one of Canada’s most successful weightlifting coaches over three decades involved in the sport.
Born and raised in Vancouver, Wes’ earliest sports memories actually date to attending boarding school in China when he watched university athletes compete at sports days. When Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party rose to power in 1949, Wes was whisked back home to Canada.
Wes competed in track and field at Van Tech High School, in 1955 winning the Vancouver & District junior shot put competition. It was while training for the shot that he first became interested in weightlifting and was inspired by Vancouver’s own Doug Hepburn, 1953 world heavyweight champion. Dedicated from the start, Wes lugged his first-ever weights—two 15 lb dumbbells—over a kilometre home from a company called Letson and Burpee on Alexander Street. Training out of the basement of the Rufus Gibbs Boys Club, Wes set several BC junior and senior weightlifting records in the mid-1950s.
Wes often trained with a high school friend named John Minichiello, who a few years later coached Harry Jerome to an Olympic 100m bronze medal using a set of weights Wes loaned them. It was the first sign for Wes that his training methods could lead to true success.
Working as a pharmacist by day for much of his coaching career, in 1965 Wes began training his earliest of hundreds of lifters, 15 of whom later became Canadian national weightlifting or powerlifting champions including Paul Bjarnason, Wayne Wilson, Keith Adams, Brian Marsden, and Wendy Sperling. At the same time, Wes became more involved in the organizational end of the sport serving his first of two terms as president of the BC Weightlifting Association from 1966-71 and later 1979-81.
Wes served as head coach of Canada’s national weightlifting team at three Olympics (1968, 1976, 1980), in the process becoming the first Chinese-Canadian coach of any Canadian Olympic team in history. He also coached Canadian weightlifters at the 1971 and 1975 Pan American Games, 1974 and 1977 World Weightlifting Championships, and 1979 World Superheavyweight Weightlifting Championships.
At the 1978 Commonwealth Games, his Canadian weightlifters won seven medals (including three gold), the best performance ever by any single international weightlifting team in Canadian history.
Written and researched by Jason Beck, Curator of the BC Sports Hall of Fame.