Women's weightlifting at the Paris Olympics

Spoiler warning: This post has spoilers for the women's weightlifting 49kg weight class at the 2024 summer Olympics.

I love women's weightlifting at the Olympics. In a few seconds of incredible intensity, a human being does something that might be impossible. Because she's pushing the limits of what she can do, the athlete herself often doesn't know if it'll happen and I get to participate in that vicarious thrill of one person's struggle against the iron weight, against her own physical and psychological limits. When they succeed it's glorious. When they fail, and there are so many ways to fail, it's fascinating to see how they handle it, how they handle safely bailing out, or dropping the weight, or accepting the red light from the judges. How they hold it together, or don't.

I also love it because it's the sport I understand the most, so I get how difficult it is. Not just like in a theoretically impressed way, but like, holy shit, I can't believe she did that because I can imagine that weight on me way. I used to lift weights, though I did powerlifting. Olympic lifting has two events, the snatch and the clean and jerk. In both of those events, you pick up a barbell from the ground and lift it over your head, ending in a position where you stand with your arms extended up and the barbell over your head. The lifts are done quickly, and require strength, flexibility, and speed. They are very technically difficult to perform and you pretty much need a a coach to learn them.

Powerlfting, on the other hand, is composed of three lifts, the bench press, the squat, and the deadlift. I don't imagine I need to describe the bench press. It's the quintessential gymbro move (and incidentally was my worst lift, not only in terms of the absolute weight but how much progress I made). In powerflifting, the squat is performed by putting the barbell, which is loaded on a rack at about chest chest height, on your back, squatting down, and then standing back up again. The back squat is probably the technically hardest powerlifting move. And yet, it's easy compared to the front squat or overhead squat that's just a part of the snatch or the clean and jerk. The deadlift starts with the loaded barbell on the floor. Then you bend over and pick it up, ending up in a sompletely standing position with your arms hanging down. The deadlift is the lift where most people can lift the most weight, because it uses your biggest muscles and you move the weight a short distance. I loved the deadlift. I was a weakling in the bench press, and my poor flexiblity and proportions (short torso, long legs) made the squat very hard for me to do in good form, but the deadlift was the perfect lift for my body shape. If I recall correctly my best ever deadlift was either just under or exactly at 200 pounds. At the time I weighed probably 145 or 150 pounds. In kilograms that would be lifting about 90 kilogram while weighing about 68 kilograms. These are honestly not very impressive numbers for powerlifting, but they made me very happy and scared the crap out of people who don't understand what the body is capable of. (Not the people at the gym and definitely not the people at San Francisco's World Gym who were extremely chill and very welcoming of anyone who came to the squat racks and did their thing.)

I mention these numbers to give you a little perspective, which I keep with me every time I watch Olympic weightlifting. So for comparison, me, at my fittest, weighing 68kg and deadlifiting 90kg, about 10 years ago.

Now let's time travel to Wednesday, August 7, 2024, when I watched the women's 49kg weight class weightlifting. A weight class is the maximum weight you can be, so any one competing in 49k weighs 49 kg or less. The woman who had the highest snatch result lifted 93kg. The woman who had the highest clean and jerk lifted 117kg.

For the imperial weight measurement folks at home that's women who weigh under 108 pounds and are lifting 205 pounds in the snatch and 258 pounds in the clean and jerk. Like, holy shit. The body mass to power ratio of these athletes blows my mind when I think about it. Just, damn, picking up more than twice your body weight in iron and sticking it above your head.

You know what's also hard? Simply literally doing an overhead squat with any object above you. I can't do it with a freaking broom handle. Correction: I couldn't do it with a freaking broom handle when I was at my fittest. Oh, and the Olympic weightlifters tend to go much deeper than powerlifters, because there isn't someone checking if their squat is parallel. No, they're fighting the motherfucking forces of gravity, and the deeper and more flexible they can be in that squat when they need to, the more weight they can hoist above their heads. Which is to say, there is an intense incentive built right into the mechanics of the lift that rewards a deep squat, or at the very least, the ability to take that squat as deep as you need to to catch the snatch on the way up and limit how high you have to get it up with your arms and shoulders, which are, of course, always much weaker than than the powerful muscles of your posterior chain.

I love the different ways that athletes deal with the psychology of lifting. Several of the athletes yell before they start, seeming to yell at the bar. Some athletes stand there for a moment, composing themselves. The Thai Olympian, Surodchana Khambao, squatted down by the bar and stayed down for about 15 seconds of the 30 seconds she had to start each lift. I couldn't tell if she was meditating or listening to coaching cues from her coach off to the side. During most of her attempts, the Romanian competitor, Mihaela Valentina Cambei, on the other hand, walked up to the bar, waited for the judges signal, and immediately lifted in a very straightforward way. She saved all her emotions for after the lift was completed, yelling exuberantly after a particularly impressive lift. I love all the yelling. But I also love the stone-cold calm, the laughing, the polite bows to the audience, everything.

I love the personal style touches that the athletes bring to the games, too. Hou Zhihui of China, who won the gold and was one of the competitors who yelled before each lift and sported a very utilitarian hairstyle, wrapped herself in a fuzzy blanket with pink hearts between attempts. The other athletes had plain blankets, as far as I could see, so it must have been a choice. Mirabai Chanu Saikhom of India had a series of colorful rubber bands in her pulled back bangs, possibly in the Olympic colors, and bowed with her palms together after lifts. Mihaela Valentina Cambei wore intense eyeshadow bedazzled with a row of gems on either side. She looked like a video game barbarian lady, at once intensely femme and completely no-nonsense when it came to lifting the weights and glorying in success.

I love that despite the fundamental simplicity of weightlifting--a human being lifts the iron above her head--there are so many ways to be a weightlifter.