Bruce Cameron

Bruce Cameron, born in 1942, had an outstanding weightlifting career and then became a key figure in the selection of New Zealand Olympic and Commonwealth Games teams for several decades.

His early sports were athletics, competing for Western Suburbs in Auckland, and rugby, playing at senior level for North Shore.

He toured Australia with the New Zealand Colts in 1964. Cameron, only 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall, was a sturdy halfback. Among his team-mates were current All Blacks Chris Laidlaw, the captain, Bill Davis, Ian MacRae, Ray Moreton, Neil Wolfe and Ian Smith. Cameron ripped an abductor muscle early on and was able to play in only two of the seven tour matches.

The injury signalled the end of his rugby career, so he turned to weightlifting, having always enjoyed lifting weights as training for rugby. With Les Mills coaching him, he improved quickly and in 1965 won the national featherweight (60kg) title in Auckland. Weightlifting ideally suited his body shape, natural strength and temperament.

Nine months later Cameron was in the New Zealand team to the Empire Games in Kingston, Jamaica, where he competed in the featherweight weightlifting.

The Aucklander finished 8th. He completed a press of 181¾lb, a snatch of 198¼lb, and a jerk of 259lb for a total of 639lb. The gold medal went to Chung Kum Weng of Wales, with a total of 743lb.

It was an important event for Cameron, who always had a good overview of sport generally. He watched several fellow Aucklanders triumph - Don Oliver winning the heavyweight gold medal at the weightlifting, Roy Williams taking his belated opportunity to compete at an Empire Games by winning the decathlon gold, and Les Mills winning gold and silver in the discus and shot put. Those performances, and many others in Jamaica, made an indelible impression on Cameron.

He was determined to make the Olympic team in 1968, but was injured before the trials and forced to lift “virtually on one leg”, as he described it.

By the 1970 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, he was an experienced competitor and came through in the lightweight (67.5kg) category. With 107.5kg in the press (only secured after he’d missed his first two attempts), 105kg in the snatch and 142.5kg in the jerk, he totalled 335kg. That was well behind Englishman George Netwon’s 372.5kg and Ieuan Owen of Wales 355kg, but it was good enough for bronze. “That was my weightlifting highlight, the first medal. I’ll never forget that thrilI. I won it on the third day of the Games and we hadn’t won anything until then, so it was an important one.”

He made a determined effort to qualify for the 1972 Munich Olympics, and just missed. “If I’d held the bar up for a split-second longer in my final lift at the trials, I’d have qualified. I cleared the weight, jerked it above my head and then just blacked out, stumbled and dropped it. “That was the end of it. I was extremely close, but I didn't cry about it. I just said in two years’ time I've got a Commonwealth Games.”

In those Games, in Christchurch, Cameron was one of seven members of New Zealand’s nine-strong weightlifting team to win medals.

Cameron competed in the lightweight grade again, and again took the bronze. He lifted 110kg in the snatch and 142.5kg in the jerk, for a total of 252.5kg. The medallists were the same as in Edinburgh. This time Newton totalled 260kg and Owen 255kg. Cameron’s total showed he’d made up considerable ground on the two lifters ahead of him. He only narrowly failed to lift 147.5kg, which would have elevated him to the silver medal. He won the bronze from Bill Frew of Australia because though they recorded the same total, Cameron had the lighter bodyweight.

Cameron retired from competition after 1974 with eight national titles under his belt, but certainly didn’t turn his back on sport. He’d already been secretary and treasurer (he was an accountant by occupation) of the national weightlifting association, and in 1977 he became a New Zealand Olympic and Commonwealth Games selector. He filled the role filled for 27 years, often as panel convener. He selected teams for seven Winter Olympics, seven Summer Olympics and seven Commonwealth Games.

Cameron was an admirable combination as a selector: extremely knowledgeable over the full range of sports, hard-headed enough to make tough calls and understanding enough to appreciate the impact his decisions were having on people’s lives.

Under Cameron’s watch the number of controversial selections and omissions in Games teams fell away, and consistency and attention to detail became paramount.

One of the things drove him as a selector, he said, was pride in the New Zealand blazer.

“The pride that you've won that blazer. You're not a basketballer, weightlifter or track and field athlete, you're part of a team representing not just that sport, but the whole country. It's important we have the right people there to bring credit and honour to New Zealand and in most cases we achieved that.”

During the last decade of his time as a selector Cameron was also a member of the Halberg Awards selection panel, where he was a crucial figure because of his knowledge over so many sports.

His time as a Games selector ended in controversy in 2004, when he resigned after the selectors’ decision not to pick the women’s basketball team for the Athens Olympics was over-ruled. He felt the basketballers had not done enough to justify selection. “If you take all the soft options you'll soon have a soft underbelly and become a soft organisation,” he explained.

Nevertheless his massive contribution was acknowledged in 2006 when he was awarded the Olympic Order of New Zealand. That same year he was awarded an ONZM. In 1990 he’d been awarded the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal.

Cameron became a New Zealand Olympic Committee board member in 1995, serving two terms as vice-president.