By Nour ElDean
19 years old Mostafa Enan is officially a powerlifting world champion. He’s also a computer science engineering student. Does it stop there? No, he’s raising the bar higher. This champ teaches us that you don’t just aspire to be one thing; you’re not just a body, a face or a brain – you’re the whole package. He as a whole is aspiring to be an engineer, plays American football, is an HR manager in an NGO called Artkhana, and is also a member of different clubs such as INSPIRE.
He’s scored 6 gold medals! Let’s try and keep up with his medals; 2 gold medals for ‘full power’ in his age category, raw and single ply. 2 gold medals for ‘bench’ in his age category, both raw and single ply. 2 gold medals for ‘dead lift’ in his age category, raw and single ply.
The AWCP Federation competition took place in Idaho Falls, USA, from September 2 to September 4. The powerlifting competition is basically 3 lifts: bench, squat and dead lift. In each branch of lifting the athlete gets 3 attempts to try and reach his maximum weight. The scores are announced according to the total weight lifted in all of the branches.
Did Mostafa break any world records? He sure did! He made his way to 4 world records in his age category for squatting single ply – also, a bench single ply world record in his age category, dead lift single world record in his age category, and lastly – dead lift raw world record in his age category. He also got his silver medal in the ‘dead lift’ in the open age category competing with people whose ages are up to 33.
As an athlete, Mostafa doesn’t take steroids as he prefers to keep his body growing naturally in a healthy direction as he believes in hard work. The federation where he competed, there are 2 branches: the one with a drug test and the one without. We can guess which one Mostafa competed in.
We asked Mostafa what his sport taught him and he thought that sports are a way of educating ourselves. He has learned to manage his time, to pursue his dreams and manage his priorities. It made him more into reading as he started reading about his sport from a scientific aspect; he learned more about muscle anatomy, biology and basically learned more about how to give a better performance.
Powerlifting to him was a way to let his anger and emotions out; he struggled with education and finding out where he belongs. He also struggled with negative energy he feels as his passion is misunderstood by people since he doesn’t feel like his efforts and dreams are acknowledged .
Mostafa is trying to balance between his athletic career and education, but unfortunately our educational system doesn’t allow that – to the extent that people might quit their favorite sport (which means abandoning their dreams) for the sake of education and the pressure society adds on us and even if the athlete manages to continue pursuing their professional career – they’d mess up their educational one because the universities in Egypt are demanding; time, efforts and definitely most of your concentration. We’re hoping soon enough there’d be sports scholarships like in Europe where this career would be taken seriously.
Despite these challenges, Mostafa told us that his parents have been extremely supportive of his dream, to the extent that they fund his training and eventually funded his trip and everything that was needed all the way to Idaho Falls for the competition.
Let’s not forget about his coach Mohamed Saeed (3 times world champion) who gives his team all his best efforts and his knowledge, both technical and scientific, which has eventually led them to become world champions. The team did very well, each member receiving at least one first place medal in his or her category: Mohamed Menaissy, Mohamed Mourad, Beshoy Ibrahim, Mina Ibrahim, Ali Shaht and Dina Saad who’s the first Egyptian female powerlifter.
This championship was the first time for Egyptians to compete in the AWPC federation and they’ve got plenty of medals out of this competition for sure. Egypt is ranked second place after USA by 8 points only! There were around 46 countries represented in this competition by different athletes. This was a good way to raise awareness about this sport and its important to both us Egyptians and the world. People are starting to recognize the athletes’ hard work and this was a way to explain the difference between power lifting and weight lifting to people as they often confuse them together. The athletes are also becoming well known internationally so it was a good way to get Egypt recognized for what it’s capable of doing.
Egypt’s definitely making its way to the top in the athletic world and we couldn’t be more proud!
