Ito earns trip to Jr. Pan-Am Games

Bonsall weightlifter Colin Ito qualified for the Junior Pan-American Games which will be held October 20-22 in Puerto Rico.

Ito will be one of eight boys who will compete for the United States at the Junior Pan-American Games in San Juan and Caguas. He qualified for the Junior Pan-American games at the Junior Pan-Am Qualifier in Colorado Springs July 16.

“I got the last spot,” he said.

Ito had been ranked 13th entering the qualifier. “That was ranked off a meet where I did really bad,” he noted.

At Colorado Springs, Ito set a personal record in the snatch by lifting 135 kilograms, and he lifted 172 1/2 kilograms in the clean and jerk to fall only 2 1/2 kg short of his personal record in that event.

The performance at Colorado Springs moved him to eighth in the rankings, providing him with the final spot on the United States team. “I was pretty happy,” he remarked.

The United States will send eight boys and six girls to Puerto Rico. The 14 qualifiers represent all lifter weight classes. Ito competes in the superheavyweight, or 105 kilogram and above, division.

Ito, who turned 18 in April, has been involved in weightlifting for nearly five years. The Ito family spent two years in San Marcos and moved to Bonsall before Colin entered school. After attending Bonsall Elementary School, he was a student at Sullivan Middle School.

During the 2000-01 school year Ito’s physical education teacher at Sullivan was Leslie Burgener, whose husband is a weightlifting coach. Burgener became acquainted with Ito’s mother and eventually suggested that Colin take up weightlifting. “I didn’t find any other sports that I like,” Colin Ito noted.

Ito began training under Mike Burgener and has continued with the sport. “I really enjoy weightlifting,” he remarked.

The trip to Puerto Rico will be Ito’s second. Two years ago he participated in the Creolo Cup. Although he was a school-age lifter competing against junior and senior division lifters, he still placed third in the clean and jerk and third overall.

Ito’s training with Burgener will soon become sporadic. USA Weightlifting, the sport’s governing body, provides college scholarships to student-athletes. Ito applied for an available scholarship at Northern Michigan University and received that scholarship. Had he not received the scholarship he would have stayed in Bonsall and trained with Burgener, but he will instead sandwich his Puerto Rico trip with studies at the school in the Upper Peninsula town of Marquette.

Weightlifting is not an intercollegiate sport, so the scholarships are provided by USA Weightlifting rather than by the university. Ito has not yet declared a major at Northern Michigan.

“I owe a lot of - basically everything - to Coach Mike and his family,” Ito said. “They’ve really helped me get to where I am.”