Deborah Zamor

Contributor 

On Friday December 5th at around 2pm, 18 year old Juliette Etienne-Labelle, can be found where she spends a good amount of her time; Verdun Fitness, where she trains. Being a powerlifter, she needs to follow a tailored training program, put together by her coach, to maximize progress and maintain strength. When I find her at the gym, she is just finishing deadlifts alongside her boyfriend, Romain. She pulls her leather weightlifting belt tight around her waist, secures black straps on her hands, and begins her last set. Her grip is firm, her stance strong, and her wavy hair loose, as she lifts the bar holding three plates on each side, repetitively, pushing until failure. “Some days I feel weak in my deadlifts,” she says, and “don’t have enough energy to do accessories” which she later explains are the side exercises, “But today I’m happy, I feel good.” She invites me to do the rest of her workout with her and walks me through each exercise. It is easy to see that she is in her element, bubbly and excited, encouraging me in each exercise and warmly saluting several people at the gym. When lifting however, she is focused, counts her reps, and pushes until her body gives out.

As a first year Dawson student in the General Social Science program, Juliette is now balancing CEGEP life with her sport. When she started at Dawson this fall, school was almost immediately interrupted by her trip to Costa Rica in September for the Worlds Championships, where she represented Canada and came in 9th (in her category) in the world. However, she has been on the student-athlete grind for almost four years now. In secondary two, at Collège de Montréal, she started going to the gym at lunch time and by the next year, one of the coaches offered to make her a personal training program. After a year of training seriously, Juliette did her first competition and ended up qualifying for both provincials and nationals. “That […] really motivated me to keep going,” she says. 

“I first saw Juliette training at the gym at school with her friends, and my colleague and I noticed that she had really good potential,” says Juliette’s coach, Guillaume Charbonneau Lemaire. “[…] We pushed, pushed, pushed her and saw that she was really strong, after like a couple months she was squatting two plates on her back, and it didn’t even look hard yet.” Eventually, Guillaume trained Juliette at school four days a week, and then accompanied her through all her first competitions, creating a tight bond between the two. Guillaume remains her coach and close friend to this day. “Juliette’s resilience in difficult moments is one of the things she has the most of, but also really her capacity to want to be competitive […] in competitions she really has a switch where she gets in a mode of like “let’s go win this” and “get out of my way,” says Guillaume “it’s really special to see.”

When it came to competing at a worldwide level, Juliette was faced with the intense obstacle of managing competition stress. Throughout the spring and summer of 2025, she felt the looming competition in September like a weight on her shoulders. “It also impacted my training,” she says, “because I felt less strong, and so when I would lift something and it felt heavier, it would make me doubt myself more.” This self-doubt made her extremely unmotivated to go to the gym, it was only her friends or her boyfriend working out beside her, being the only thing that kept her going. However, getting through the Worlds Championships itself turned out to be the thing that got her over this slump. “After I did it, I felt this weight off of me, and I was like oh my goodness that’s what was weighing on me for so long.”  

In terms of her biggest supporters, Juliette counts herself lucky to be surrounded by so many of them, them being her boyfriend, friends, coach and family. “Travelling and competing, it can, you know, cost a lot of money or it can use up a lot of time” she says. But her mom is always ready to buy the plane tickets and support from the sidelines, along with Juliette’s older sister Ella Etienne-Labelle. 

“Growing up with Juliette, she was always very strong and athletic,” says Ella. “In school she always wanted to wrestle and kick a soccer ball around and play sports together.” She also mentions that Juliette had always been incredibly determined in all her sports, as well as very dynamic, and a leader, which she says, “carried through to her sport today.” 

When asked why she loves this sport, Juliette mentioned that part of the reason is that anyone can do it, and she loves to see how heavy she can lift. “Through this initial spark, the passion went through more than the physical activity itself,” she explains. Her sister Ella vouches for the fact that this passion is what has brought Juliette this far. “I think why Juliette has been able to make it to the World Championships is ultimately her dedication and her enthusiasm for her sport, she just loves it so much […] it’s been so amazing to be able to support her, we are so so proud.”