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player ready...If you like confident women, defined as “women who could pick up your refrigerator unassisted,” you would love Olympic women’s weightlifting.
Competitive weightlifting is hugely popular in Greece. This dates back to ancient times, when the Greeks had to be very strong because pretty much all their possessions were made of marble. A single salad fork could weigh 50 pounds.
Today, competitive weightlifting is not a big deal in the U.S. But the rest of the world produces a lot of competitive weightlifters, including, at these Olympic Games, such athletes as (these are real names) Bartlomiej Bonk, Po Fu Chen, Zbynek Dub, Hripsime Khurshudyan, Namecrakpam Kunjarani, Samson Ndicka, Furkat Saidov, Ferit Sen, Gonghong Tang, Gert Trasha, Blessed Udah, Xiangxiang Zhang and, of course, Deborah Lovely.
I mention these names to illustrate the wide appeal of competitive weightlifting, not to suggest that they sound funny. It is wrong to make fun of people just because they’re from a different culture, especially if they can break you in half like a strand of uncooked spaghetti.
The weightlifting competition I saw was the women’s 63-kg class. I’m not sure whether this means the actual women weighed 63 kg or the weights they lifted weighed 63 kg. Or possibly the temperature in the hall was 63 kg.
There’s no way to know for sure without finding out what a “kg” is, and my belief, as an American, is that if I have to start understanding the metric system, the terrorists have won.
One by one these women would walk out onto the weightlifting platform, and there, waiting for them, was Old Man Gravity, in the form of a steel bar with major weights at either end. Perhaps you’re a guy reading this, and perhaps you think you’re pretty strong. I’m telling you right now that to lift the weight these women were dealing with, you’d need the help of at least two friends, and one of them would have to own a crane.
But these women would squat, grab the weight, pause for a moment and then–while emitting a grunt that was loud and yet at the same time distinctly feminine–they’d hoist this massive thing over their heads.
As the crowd shouted encouragement, the lifters would hold the weight high, their faces red and contorted with strain, their bodies vibrating with effort, until the cathartic moment when their eyeballs were ejected into the crowd.
No, seriously, that happened only a couple of times. Usually the judges would signal that it was a good lift, and the lifter would bang the weight down with a thump detectable by seismic instruments in Iceland. As the crowd cheered, the lifter would stride off the stage, leaving Old Man Gravity lying on the ground, defeated, a victim of changing times.
Sitting in the press section, I was inspired by these women. I lifted my ice cream bar to my mouth with renewed determination. That thing weighed at least a kg.