Seventy-four-year-old powerlifting vanguard adds to resumé with win at World Bench Press Championships
Susan Haywood has built a legacy of raising the bar.
Breaking barriers and pushing the limits is all this 74-year-old farmer from Erinview has known.
Haywood has been the queen of the Masters divisions in the growing sport of powerlifting for the better part of three decades, winning provincial and national championships by bench pressing, squatting and deadlifting astonishing amounts of weight that would make anyone’s eyebrows raise.
She added “world champion” to her resumé earlier this month at the World Bench Press Championships in Austin, Tex. when she won her weight class in the Masters 4 (70-plus) division. Haywood was later surprised to find out that her best lift of 67.5 kilograms placed her in the top three competitors for her age in the world.
However, the accolades are merely the cherry on top. These days, Haywood doing it for a bigger purpose.
“Every time I go out — and I’m not bragging — always somebody comes up to me and says, ‘You’re my inspiration,’ Haywood said recently. “If I can encourage one person to get off the couch and make themselves healthier, I will. I’ll keep doing it because that’s what inspires me to keep going.”
Born in England, Haywood moved to the Winnipeg neighbourhood of Charleswood at 17 years old. She later married and uprooted to St. François Xavier, about 15 minutes west of the city.
Haywood’s story in the gym began in the early 90s, shortly after her first husband died at an early age. Grieving from her partner’s passing, she moved to St. James with her three sons and started a hairdressing business.
Still desperate for an outlet to vent her frustration, she turned to fitness.
“I decided to get myself together, so I started going to the gym and I started bodybuilding,” she said.
Years later, Haywood found herself in the thick of the fitness community at a fundraiser for powerlifting and bodybuilding. It’s where she met her current husband, Brock, who was a standout in his own right in the powerlifting world.
“Of course, the first question anybody ever asks you is, ‘How much can you bench?’ Haywood said. Her answer floored the powerlifters, to which they coaxed the 48-year-old to try the sport.
“Back then, drugs were a big part of bodybuilding, and of course, in my 40s I wasn’t going to dabble in that,” Haywood said. “That was putting me off because I would train just as hard as another person beside me, but she would go on drugs and she would beat me at the last minute.
“I’m a very competitive person, and so with bodybuilding, I didn’t feel like it was me being presented to the audience, it was either the drugs or my trainer or my diet. Whereas this, it’s actually me being judged, and I want t be judged by who I am and not what I look like.”
Haywood became an immediate sensation in the sport, impressing audiences with incredible feats of strength as a middle-aged and now-senior woman. Her legacy has reached new peaks in recent years.
In 2018, she became Canada’s first female international powerlifting referee; In 2019, she became the first Masters-4 category female lifter in the country and set a new Canadian record in the division of a 73-kg bench press.
Haywood will turn 80 in 2029 — she plans to break another barrier.
“They don’t have a Master 5 yet and I want to be the first,” she said.
Brock has been Susan’s partner in life and training for the last 30 years. He said that she’s been a constant source of inspiration.
“Well, she is an inspiration just by the fact that she does what she does and she’s been a vanguard,” said Brock. “There were women powerlifters, but in Manitoba, the women that came and went didn’t stick around as long. When Susan started, she was having success and she trained and kept going and because there weren’t a lot of women her age, she was winning and doing world championships and going up against other ladies from around the world.
“Back here in Canada,” he continued, “people saw her there and the old story is that people don’t think they can do something until they see someone like them doing it. A lot of women have approached her over the years, and she has been an influence and an inspiration for them to get into the sport.”
Susan said the growth in the sport has been encouraging, with more senior female lifters joining and athletes as young as 10 years old taking to powerlifting. She knows what the sport has done for her, and she’ll continue to push everyone to try it.
“This sport is for every age and for every weight class,” she said. “It’s not what you look like, it’s how much you can do and how much you train.
“I encourage everybody to try because you don’t know until you try.”
