China’s Hou Zhihui and Li Fabin retained their Olympic titles on Wednesday as weightlifting finally joined the Paris Olympic party, slimmed down and insisting it had cleaned up its act after major internal surgery.
Both winners broke Olympic records they set three years ago in Tokyo when their weight classes were first contested at the Games. In the women’s 49-kilogramme class, Hou needed the clean and jerk record of 117kg with her final lift to overtake Romanian Mihaela Valentina Cambei and win by one kilogramme. Over the two rounds Hou, who stands 1.46 metres (4-foot-10), hoisted 206kg. Surodchana Khambao of Thailand took bronze.
Earlier in the men’s 61kg, the 31-year-old Li broke his Olympic record with 143kg in the opening snatch round. He went on to total of 310 kilogrammes over the two rounds in the lightest men’s class to beat Theerapong Silachai of Thailand by 7kg. Hampton Morris of the United States was third.
“I’ll give myself nine out of 10,” said Li. “The black spot was clean and jerk. But it is the Olympics and I won smoothly, so nine out of ten is appropriate.”
The eight remaining weight categories in Paris are new. In the past, weightlifting, pockmarked by doping, has shuffled classes to create “clean” records. This time, the problem is its shrinking Olympic allocations. In Rio in 2016, 260 weightlifters competed across 15 events - one more for men than for women. In Paris, the quota is down to 120, battling for 10 gold medals.
The sport is a victim of the drive to add more Olympic competitions without adding more competitors, but it is also a victim of its own murky past.
The sport lags only track and field for most failed Olympic doping tests.
No weightlifter failed a test in Tokyo but, after the Games, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach called weightlifting and boxing his “problem children” and threatened to boot them out.
By then long-time International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) president Tamas Ajan had been forced out following a 2020 German documentary that found, among a long list of accusations, he had covered up positive doping tests. The IWF went through five presidents in 30 months, ending with the election of Iraqi Mohamed Jalood, along with a new executive board, in June 2022.
One of Jalood’s reforms was to shut the door on transgender athletes after New Zealander Laurel Hubbard became the centre of a media frenzy in Tokyo.
He also brought in the International Testing Agency to work with a previously secretive sport. “We are fully determined to change the way the world in general and the sport community in particular is looking at weightlifting,” Jalood said.
