Miss Chukwu lifts the stone, by Marcus Delaney
An original contemporary online feature.
The stone weighs 120 kilograms. That is roughly the weight of a large fridge freezer, or of four of the Year 4 pupils at Brookfield Primary School in Leicester, if you could persuade them to stand still on the scales together. It is perfectly round, slightly sticky with resin, and sitting on the floor of a sports arena in Birmingham in front of 2,000 people. Grace Chukwu, who teaches those Year 4 pupils, has sixty seconds to lift it onto a platform the height of her chest.
In the third row, twelve of them are watching, with a banner that reads ‘GO MISS C!’ in letters that slope downhill.
Grace is thirty-one. Five years ago she had never lifted anything heavier than a box of exercise books. She found strongwoman by accident, she tells me the day before the competition, after a boy in her class announced during a PE lesson that ‘girls can’t be strong, it’s science’. ‘I thought, right,’ she says, laughing. ‘Challenge accepted.’ She joined a local strength gym that weekend, and the coach, spotting something unusual in the way she lifted, suggested she try a competition.
Strongwoman is not a gentle sport. Athletes pull lorries by rope, carry 150-kilogram frames along a track, press giant logs above their heads and, in the most famous event, lift a series of heavy round stones onto platforms. It requires extraordinary power, but also technique, balance and a willingness to be in pain in public. Grace trains four evenings a week after marking, eats six meals a day and, by her own account, owns no clothes that fit her shoulders.
She is also, by every account, a superb teacher. Her headteacher calls her ‘the calmest person in the building’. Her classroom has a ‘strength wall’ where pupils post things that were hard and that they did anyway: learning the seven times table, reading aloud in assembly, being brave at the dentist. Grace’s own entries are up there too, written in the same felt-tip pen.
Back in the arena, she bends over the stone, wraps her arms round it and heaves. It rises to her knees, then stops. For a second, nothing happens. Her face contorts. The crowd goes quiet. Then she drops her hips, rolls the stone up onto her lap, takes one huge breath and drives upwards with a roar that can be heard at the back of the hall. The stone tips onto the platform with a thud.
The noise from the third row is extraordinary.
Grace finishes fourth overall, two points off a medal. She is, she admits, disappointed, and then immediately, typically, she turns the disappointment into a lesson. ‘I want them to see that,’ she says, nodding towards the banner. ‘You don’t always win. You show up, you try your hardest, and you come back stronger. That’s the whole thing, really.’
On Monday morning, she says, there will be a new card on the strength wall. It will say: ‘Lifted a stone in front of 2,000 people. Came fourth. Going again.’ And in Year 4, at least, nobody will be claiming that girls can’t be strong.
Grace Chukwu is described as an inspiring role model. How does the writer try to show this?
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