The ideal weightlifter has short femurs and a long torso to allow for a more upright squat position which translates to more efficient lifts. To answer this completely we need to look at what makes a good weightlifter. To squat 200kg (440lbs) once at age 17 is an incredible achievement, to say nothing of doing it 13 times when already fatigued from a workout.Ĭhina is not unique in having a system to develop athletes for weightlifting and other sports starting at a young age – many former Soviet Bloc countries including Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan have similar systems to train athletes. Elite US lifters usually would only have been training for 3 years at this point, if not less. The weightlifter shown above doubtless already has almost a decade of training under his belt. Someone who has been training consistently in good conditions since they were 8 is going to have a massive advantage over an athlete who only started when they were 16 – the former athlete’s body will be much more conditioned to handle intense training and his neuro-muscular system will already have learned the proper motor patterns necessary in weightlifting – not to mention the 8 or 9 years of training that the athlete will already have gone through. In China, athletes are often selected to attend sport schools as young as 8 years old. In contrast, USA Weightlifting (USAW), weightlifting’s governing body in the US, provides stipends which rarely exceed $10,000 only a select few athletes receive. In the United States, the best athletes go to where the money is – the NFL, NBA, and other sports where contracts regularly run in the tens of millions of dollars. Chinese weightlifters are given yearly stipends and are provided room and board for free provided they continue to train and compete for the national team. The Chinese government has poured funding into developing systems for each of these sports – systems that include every possible aspect needed to produce successful athletes, from scouting to world class coaching to designer drugs (yes, drugs. Today, China completely overshadows the rest of the world in certain sports: diving, table tennis, badminton, certain shooting events, and weightlifting. However, as the Cold War died down and the Cultural Revolution ended, China saw a new opportunity for itself on the international stage – sports. Whoever could produce the better athletes would be seen as the superior country. Throughout the 20th century, Olympic weightlifting, along with many other things, was seen as a way for the two countries to indirectly fight the Cold War. Way back in the early days of Olympic weightlifting, the US and Soviet Union where seen as the dominant powers. In fact, China holds more world records than the 3 next closest countries combined. The next closest country is Russia, a country whose weightlifting heritage goes back to the beginning of the Cold War, with 24 world records. Perhaps another metric that might be useful in conveying China’s dominance is world records out of a possible 135 records (snatch, clean and jerk, and total records for 15 different weight classes over 3 different age divisions), China holds an astounding 48. The top five +75kg lifters were also all Chinese, as well as the top three 63kg lifters and the top four 48kg lifters. Take the women’s 53kg weight class, for instance the top 8 lifters in 2015 were all Chinese. In some ways, China’s dominance in women’s weightlifting is even more staggering. For 69kg men, 6 out of the top 10 were Chinese, and you need to go down to 6th place before you encounter a non-Chinese lifter. For 62kg men, 5 out of the top 10 lifters in the world were Chinese. Take 2015, for example: for 56kg men, 9 out of the 10 best lifters in the world were Chinese. This is a question that was raised in the comment section of my last post, and a question that is continuously asked within the weightlifting community.īefore we examine why China consistently produces the best weightlifters I think it’s important to understand the level of dominance that Chinese weightlifters have, particularly in the lighter weight classes.
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