Behind every one of Gila Smith and her aunt Sorah Garber’s lifts at the South African Powerlifting Championships were years of discipline, setbacks, and determination. Their dedication paid off as they claimed victory in their divisions at the championships between 19 and 22 March.
“It was wonderful competing together with my niece. It made the competition so much more enjoyable,” says Garber. They weren’t competing against each other, as Garber won in the adult division, while Smith’s achievement was in the sub-junior division.
“Competing next to my aunt made the atmosphere lighter and more relaxed,” says Smith. “It’s nice having someone close to me competing because we understand and support each other.”
Garber, an electrical engineer, and Smith, a Grade 11 pupil at Hirsch Lyons, have been powerlifting for 10 and five years respectively, but never thought they would defend their respective titles at the South Africa Powerlifting Championships at the same time.
Garber says she was introduced to powerlifting a decade ago when her husband read an article by the woman who would later become her coach. “He brought it to me to read because he knew I’d enjoy the way she cut through all the nonsense around women training. She had a gym in my area, so I went to find her to see about training there,” she says.
Garber thought it would be a fun way to push herself, so she threw herself into the sport.
She likes competing as she is always striving to do better than she did before. “Often when you’re doing things, it’s hard to see progress because it’s always little by little. But here, the numbers are the numbers, you either got it or you didn’t. Some years the progress goes backwards, and your numbers aren’t improving; they’re going backwards, and you can’t even get close to what you did before. But on the whole, when you see the numbers moving up, it’s an amazing feeling.”
Smith started training at a gym when she was 12, after her dad took her to his own training sessions. She immediately felt drawn to powerlifting as it was something different and which she could do with her family. Both her aunt and cousin have done powerlifting with her.
“It’s such a different sport, and it was fun for me,” Smith says. “At competitions, everyone’s really friendly and always supporting each other because it’s a small sport, so you know everyone. But also, when you try something repeatedly it can be disheartening, but then when you finally achieve your goal, it’s more of an achievement. I really like that.”
For Garber, though she has competed in and won many South African championships before, this one felt special as she was in a different weight class, which meant that she competed against people she hadn’t before.
“It was more competitive, and I didn’t go into it knowing how it would go,” said Garber. This fuelled her more, and she even broke the South African record for the bench press, at 95.5kg.
“For me, it was all about moving forward with my body. It’s all about trying your best and just trying to be better than you are,” she says.
Smith has been competing in the sub-junior division since 2022 and bench presses at a maximum of 100kg, squats 160kg, and deadlifts 170kg. She says when she heard she had become division champ, she was over the moon, because it meant all of her training had paid off ‒ especially after a difficult training period where not everything had gone to plan.
“I was happy that I finally achieved this,” she said. “It proved that my work in the gym paid off. I did two to three months of more intense training, focused only on the competition and not doing anything else, to ensure that I wasn’t peaking in the gym for the competition. But for this competition, my training didn’t go so well before. So, I was surprised when the day went very well.”
