Topic: News: Alfreds Karklins, Graceful Strongman Raised The Bar

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Graceful Strongman Raised The Bar
Alfreds Karklins won national weightlifting championships three times and later coached hundreds at the Central YMCA
By Catherine Dunphy

He had every right to be a show-off. Alfreds Karklins was, as they used to say, a fine figure of a man, with a profile to rival Burt Lancaster's and a physique that would have equalled or surpassed California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his body-building days.

He won the Canadian middle-heavyweight weightlifting championship in 1960 and the heavyweight Canadian championship in 1963 and 1966. His family has lost track of the number of times he won the provincial and city championships. Their North York home was filled with the hardware from those competitions.

"Not another dust collector," his wife Cecilija used to say when he'd bring them home by the armful.

In a 1956 Ontario competition, he broke the record in all the weightlifting categories (the press, the snatch, and the clean and jerk). His total lift was 805 pounds (260 on the press, 230 on the snatch and 315 on the clean and jerk), besting the 730 pounds lifted by his nearest rival.

"He outclassed them all," said his older son, Imants Karklins, a police officer who also took up weightlifting and competed along with his father for a few years. "I always said he could put me through the wall. Look at the guy. He was strong."

On Nov. 9, 1959, Karklins won the Ontario Open Dead Lift contest in the morning and came second in the Mr. Toronto Body Building competition in the afternoon.

In 1968, when he was in his 40s, he set a record of 255 snatched pounds to win the Toronto Weightlifting Championship. At the same competition he pressed 285 pounds and hoisted 320 pounds in the clean and jerk, for a total of 860 pounds.

But the award of which he was proudest was one for just sixth place. He won it in 1959, the same year he became a Canadian citizen, competing for his new country in the Chicago Pan American Games. Working as a bricklayer, supporting a family with two young sons, he took time off work and paid his own way there.

There wasn't government financial support then for weightlifting competitors, and Karklins was limited as to how often and where he could compete.

"It had to be somewhere he could get to by car," said his son. "He had to spend his own money and that held him back in international competitions. Otherwise he could have gone to the 1964 Olympics."

"He would have done well internationally, no question," said John Daugavietis, a friend and the former physical director at the old Central YMCA on College St.

Instead, Karklins stayed in Toronto, teaching and mentoring hundreds of young men who came into the Y weight rooms. "He'd coach anyone who wanted to be coached," said Daugavietis. "He'd be in the weight room regularly."

He volunteered with the Ontario Powerlifting Association as a judge and took part in demonstrations at the annual Canadian National Weightlifting Championships at the Canadian National Exhibition for years.

And he could always be counted on to strut at the head of the opening parade at Latvian community get-togethers.

Karklins was a farm kid studying agriculture when the war broke out. He served in a German-controlled Latvian regiment, mostly digging ditches, he told his sons. At the end of the war, not wanting to return to Latvia, he was sent to a displaced persons camp in Belgium, and then to England, where he was forced to live in barracks and work on nearby farms for two years.

Karklins had been an enthusiastic amateur gymnast before the war, and he was invited to join an English sports club. At 5 foot 10, and with a body made even more muscular by the manual labour he'd been doing, he was an instant star.

He was often on the bottom layer of intricate human pyramid formations requiring exquisite balance and weight distribution as well as strength. He was also a showman: His family has photos of him doing handstands on the back of an army truck, on a table and on a bridge over the Thames River. There's also one of him shaving while standing on his forearms.

"He loved to be on his hands," said his son.

While he was at the English sports clubs, he discovered weightlifting. He started by lifting axles with two tire rims and worked hard on his technique, learning to do the two motions (lift the weight to the chest level, then lift the weights over the head) of the clean and jerk move, split style. The lifter must lift the weight over his head, stand up, and put the weight back down on the ground in a steady and controlled manner.

"If you waver or drop or don't lock your elbows, you lose your lift," said Imants.

Karklins liked the fact that he could better himself, and lift ever heavier weights.

"You start to talk to the weights," said his son, describing the sensation of putting one's body to its ultimate test of strength. "Nothing else matters. It's you and the weights. And after you put them down, the weight of the world is off you."

Karklins met his wife at a Latvian basketball game in England, and they immigrated to Canada in 1952. He worked as a bricklayer for 16 years, while attending night school to complete Grade 13 and earn a teaching degree. He began teaching industrial arts at Sir Robert L. Borden Secondary School in 1962, and continued to teach weightlifting at the Central Y.

His sons, Imants and Maris, would drop in to see their father after their Saturday morning Latvian classes, or on weeknights after their Latvian Boy Scouts meeting.

"He'd be there instructing. Everybody knew him," said Imants.

He was handsome, regal — and graceful, said Daugavietis. "Schwarzenegger seemed stilted, as if it was tough for him to move. But Alfreds was graceful because he was still the athlete."

After turning 40, he entered Masters competitions in the discus, shot put and hammer throw, garnering more ribbons and trophies.

He kept competing until he was about 65, when he was finally felled by a chronic slipped disc in his back.

Still, to his grandson Michael, he "just always looked strong." He was still doing small workouts at his Scarborough house when he moved into a Latvian residence in May. He died, aged 80, on Aug. 17 and was buried, at his request, in the navy blazer he'd been given as a member of the Canadian team to those 1959 Pan-Am Games.