If you want Olympic gold, you'd better be able to lift a ton of weight over your head.
Weightlifting has been a staple of competition since humans developed the cognitive ability to look at each other’s glutes, as the echoes of a softly grunted “pathetic” bounced against cave walls, forcing our ancestors to pick up the bar.
While the sport has evolved since the days of hauling large rocks, Olympic weightlifting has been a part of the Summer Games for more than a century.
Since 1976, this has boiled down to two disciplines. While there are six lifts considered “Olympic lifts,” only two are featured in the Olympic program where the world’s strongest, beefiest men and women (from 2000 onward) can medal.
Those are the snatch and the clean and jerk. Let’s talk about them, and some basics of Olympic weightlifting.
Each competitor begins with the bar — it clocks in at 7.2 feet long and 20 kilograms (44 pounds) for men and 6.6 feet long and 15 kilograms (33 pounds) for women.
Equal weight is placed on each side of the bar in the form of colorful bumper plates — weights coated in rubber that allow them to bounce when dropped. These weights range between 10 and 25 kilograms, rising in five-kilogram increments. There are also smaller, iron plates that range from 0.5 kilograms to five kilograms that can be added.
Weightlifters are divided into weight classes. While the International Weightlifting Federation recognizes 10 classes for each sex, there will only be five classes at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Those are:
Men:
Women:
In the snatch, a lifter pulls the bar up from its place on the floor while positioning their torso under it in a deep squat. From there, they spring up in one motion, arms and weight above their head, to stand up. When their knees lock out and the bar remains stable overhead, it’s a successful lift.
When all goes well, it looks like this:
The clean and jerk begins the same way as the snatch — same bar, same setup. But after lifting the weight to their front shoulders (the clean) the lifter pauses before taking on the second part of the exercise.
The jerk sees competitors drop down while extending their arms upward into a locked position. This can either be in a deep squat or with their legs split with one forward and one back — known as a split jerk. The lift is completed when the lifter gets back to a standing base, legs together and locked out.
Want to see the two disciples back to back? Great Britain’s Olympic team has got us covered via Instagram:
Unlike the World’s Strongest Man/Woman competitions, there are no Atlas stones or semi trailers to be pulled.
Olympic weightlifting is all about getting a tremendous amount of weight off the ground and over your head. Master that, and you’ve got a shot at gold.
