From mirroring the actions of her mother at the gym as a child, to standing on the youth weightlifting stage as a world record holder, Etta Love is grateful for the influence the sport has had in her life.

The women in Love’s life have always stood as her idols, representing everything she hoped to be as she grew up.

At the age of three, Love would regularly join her mom at the gym and it didn’t take long for Love’s plastic toy weights to turn into real ones. By the age of five, Love was enrolled in a kid’s CrossFit class in Saskatoon.

“It started as play for me. It was a way for me to imitate and copy the women I saw in my life, who I thought were powerful and amazing,” said Love.

Her progression in the sport came quickly, as she later joined an Olympic style weightlifting class at the age of ten.

In the years following, Love came to find the gym and weightlifting as the space where she would do a lot of her self-growth, both emotionally and physically. The gym and everything that weightlifting represented to Love brought her solace and became the activity that she felt most free in.

“As a kid who was neurodivergent and queer, I didn’t have a lot of words to describe who I was, so I grew up feeling kind of tortured,” shared Love. “[Weightlifting] was the thing that I could do to connect with my body and who I was.”

Weightlifting began to bleed into the many other areas of Love’s life, including the athletes and role models she followed online. Love explained that she would look up to women that she could find fragments of herself in.

“I had people in my gym who I wanted to be like – my first [CrossFit] coach, Farrah Dzik and my mom – who I thought were the strongest most powerful women. I had queer athletes who I started to look up to [as well].”

However, even with having numerous female role models in her life, Love still felt separate from them. There was no one individual who could represent all the characteristics Love felt she had herself. It was through the lack of having a singular individual to model herself after that Love stepped into her own identity and strength on the platform.

“[All these women] were allowed to exist in sport with only a certain level of being complex, which always made me feel like I was too much for the sport,” confessed Love. “I also want to show that I can be someone who is existing in a complex identity and I am allowed to take up space in the sport, as my full self. I don’t have to titrate messiness.”

Not only has Love nurtured an accepting space in the sport for women, but she has gone on to achieve greatness on the scoreboard.

Fueled by a passion to achieve the goals outlined in her training journal, Love found success at the Junior World Championships, which took place from Sept. 19-27 in Leon, Spain. She set a new youth world record in the female over-87-kilogram weight category with a clean and jerk lift of 146-kg.

The 17-year-old also has several other accolades, including Youth World Champion (May 2024), youngest lifter to qualify for junior world championships (March 2021) and youngest North American female to every break 200-kg total (December 2020) to name a few.

For Love, setting those records took finding tangible success outside of competition. While training she would practice reaching those numbers to build the confidence to attempt them on the stage. 

“Getting those world records is a really weird feeling, because you reach this milestone that you’ve been thinking about and ruminating over for so many years. I think that moment is really important but once I reached that, I realized just how valuable the moments before were.”

With the goal of qualifying for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, Love takes each event as an opportunity to learn, and along the way, she became a role model herself.

Now, Love is a symbol of the opportunities that are available for women in the sport, both in results and having the space to be their authentic selves. Her presence on the platform, in the gym and on social media will be a moving force for other youth athletes interested in exploring weightlifting.

“The important thing that I can do here is I cannot filtre myself in this sport. I can show up on the platform as my whole self,” said Love. “I can be tough and strong, and I can also be messy and complex and emotional. Those deserve to exist on the platform and that’s how I can show other people that they also deserve to exist there.”