Tuesday, September 26, 2000
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A captivating, discredited spectacle well worth the weight

It is without doubt the most discredited sport in the world - unless of course you count boxing as a sport - and once every four years it provides one of sport’s most compelling spectacles. That’s weightlifting for you: only five positive dope tests at these Olympics so far!

After spending most of last week feasting my eyes on Svetlana Khorkina, the tragedy queen of gymnastics, it was time to turn to her compatriot, a Russian police major called Andrei Chemerkin, who weighed in at 174.84kg - and it certainly isn’t all muscle.

This was the day of the superheavyweights, the seriously massive gentlemen. There is no limit as to how big you can be, and Chemerkin, Olympic champion, went in at the top weight by 15kg. There is no nonsense about washboard stomachs with these blokes. Some people go into the gym to come out looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger: gym-training as a painful form of cosmetics. But these men go into the gym to lift weights, and there’s an end to the matter.

There is an ugliness about the whole lot of them that is almost beautiful. They all move with the delicate, finicky care of all very large people: people used to a world made for smaller bodies than their own. Each in turn makes his delicate tread onto the stage to lift something getting on for twice his own massive bodyweight, and then carefully picks his way back.

They stand with frank beer bellies shoved out against their lifter’s leotards, or, in the case of Hossein Rezazadeh from the Islamic Republic of Iran, bellies. They carry a generous amount of adipose tissue about their persons, and to a man they have babies faces, soft moon-faces all set to contort in blind agonies of supreme effort.

They live lives of obscurity, waiting and waiting for the one moment in four years when they step into the world’s consciousness. Six times, they emerge from the obscurity of the sweaty gyms, and for a minute they stand before us.

And that’s it. Six lifts. Three snatches, three clean-and-jerks, and may the highest total win. The thing they lift weighs the world - and it matters the world. “I’d give up everything to be properly prepared for this,” said Chemerkin before the competition. “Everything” is a big word, but these are not people that think small.

The competition began, and competition inspired miracles from these men as they emerged from their four-year hibernation to live their six separate minutes in the sun. Nothing matters in this sport but this moment: for this, for all its discredit, is still a heartland Olympic sport.

How stirring was it? Well, world records fell on five separate occasions as the night wound its course. There is a complex poker game running through every weight-lifting competition: how late dare you come in? The weights only ever go up: you can’t negotiate down.

And it was, Rezazadeh who dared to wait for longest, came in for his first lift when the weight was already set at the Olympic record. On and on went the guessing and the second-guessing: time and again coming down the moment of truth when elbows and knees lock beneath the weight - or they don’t. And the weight rose inexorably, till Ashot Danielyan of Armenia went for a world record of 207.5. With all of Sydney Convention Centre seeking to suspend the law of gravity, if only for a few seconds, the weight rose, wavered, was still.

Ronny Weller of Germany tried the same weight, failed. What would you do? Weller asked for more. Went for 210 kg: and got it, face wobbling like a baby on the brink of tears. Ah, but we had reckoned without the cool poker-player. Rezazadeh would try to equal it, then? Not he.

Rezazadeh took more. He asked for 212.5kg and shouted great butch prayers at the ceiling. And then lifted the damn thing: three times the world record was broken in the space of less than ten minutes. The competiton went to the wire. The clean and jerk is serious: this is where they lift the big weights. Rezazadeh set a new world record for the total of the two lifts, and he had that to himself for a matter of minutes. Weller equalled it, moving into first place because of his lighter bodyweight.

It was Rezazadeh’s call and he went for it: adding an extra 5kg to the bar, and in a barrage of brusque, barked prayers, set the final world record of the night. “God helped me to win,” he explained. “I did not expect to win a medal.”

It was a night of brutal beauties. Strength is used with a swiftness that is perpetually surprising in these big, slow-moving men. The bodily control is to marvel at. It has to be, because once these weights start to get away from you, they go. Chemerkin said: “I must admit that sometimes looking at the weight, it is difficult even to imagine how one can lift it at all. I ask myself afterward, 'How did I manage it?'”

This strange, deeply suspect corner of sport is, at these highest moments, brutally compelling. Citius and altius are all very well but you’ve got to have fortius. You can’t have the Olympic Games without the world’s strongest man. And that is Hossein Rezazadeh.

Simon Barnes
The Times