‘Big Baby’ Li Wenwen started weightlifting at age 10 and began training in the sport at 12.
Now 23 she stared at the barbell in the South Paris Arena in the women’s +81kg competition, the final day of the Olympics. The weight was 173 kilos. Nobody else in the competition had clean and jerked more than 168kg.
More than twice her body weight was no barrier to the Chinese lifter. Wenwen snapped the bar shoulder high into a ‘racked position’, then breathed and dropped her body into a squat stance underneath.
As the bar bent under the weight, Wenwen straightened her legs, finally throwing the load above her head, holding the pose until sure she had the correct lift executed. To finish she bounced the iron on the mat and raised her chalky hands in the air.
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Korea’s Hyejeong Park was second and Britain’s Emily Campbell from Nottingham won the bronze medal with Big Baby’s combined 173kg and 136kg in the snatch for a total of 309kg, some way off the world record of 335kg but good enough for the gold medal.
The word is that weightlifting is clean again, a welcome change. Overall, over the last three weeks at Paris 2024, there has been scant talk of performance enhancing drugs (PEDS). Although several athletes have been sent home, the issue has not diverted great attention from what is going on in the pool and track.
Not everyone has left Paris with a view that it was a Games people could believe in but many have. But will it remain that way?
Last week a Greek athlete tested positive and was expelled. The name and sport were not given. There were a handful of positive tests during competition, including that of Commonwealth Games bronze medalist boxer Cynthia Ogunsemilore of Nigeria and Iraqi judo athlete Sajjad Sehen, who tested positive for steroids a day before the start of the Games.
In March, tests by the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) for USA athlete Erryion Knighton returned positive results for a banned substance. However, USADA avoided his suspension by attributing it to meat contamination, while there were Chinese swimmers in Paris who were part of a group of 23 who returned positive doping tests in advance of the Tokyo Olympics.
The USA, biggest critics of the Chinese swimmers, were quickly accused of hypocrisy.
By the time the swimming had ended, Chinese swimmers claimed two gold, three silver and seven bronze medals for a total of 12 medals, establishing a new record for China in the sport at an Olympics. One of the team, Pan Zhanle, won the men’s 100m freestyle title by setting a new world record of 46.4 seconds.
On the track Salwa Eid Naser, who won the silver medal in the women’s 400m, the same race in which Ireland’s Rashidat Adeleke came fourth, was banned in 2020 for two years because she had several whereabouts failures over a 12-month period, including one filing failure and three missed tests. It ended up in the Court of Arbitration for Sport and Naser was banned until February 2023.
Weightlifting of course has had its own issues and along with boxing has been one of the problem children in Olympic sports – boxing for different reasons.
Weightlifting had 565 sanctions between 2008 and 2019 and was only confirmed in October of last year to be among the sports on the LA 2028 roster. It had its athlete quota more than halved for Paris 2024 compared to Rio 2016.
While testers and laboratories can only do what they can, the brazenness of some athletes is unchanged. There appears to be no shame in getting caught and returning to an Olympic Games to make a podium.
Countries will take athletes back into the team environment if they think they are medal prospects. Attitudes have become more permissive and the ethical aspect doesn’t appear to figure, to the point where doping has become just part of the rules and regulations of competition.
According to a BBC report last week, Qin Haiyang posted a defiant message on Weibo after the Chinese success in the swimming pool.
“Any doubt is just a joke. Stress only makes us stronger,” he said after China’s history-making men’s 4x100m medley team beat the USA for the gold medal.
There is no expectation that there will ever be a PED-free Olympics and London 2012 was thought to be one of the cleanest ever. By the closing of the games, they’d found just nine adverse findings from a reported 6,250 tests.
But by the time samples, which can be kept for 10 years, had been reanalysed the number of positive tests ran to well over 100 including gold medal winners, making London one of the dirtiest games in history.
Time delay is part of the process now with the testing methods in place using stealth and sample history to weed out the cheats. The drawback is it allows the Olympics to steal away in pristine condition and roll on to the next city with its reputation intact. Had all those athletes in London been caught in real time during competition the outcry would have been game-changing.
As with London, we may not know the true numbers of adverse findings from Paris 2024 until perhaps LA 2028 is up and running. That allows us to believe in athletes like ‘Big Baby’ and the others in the weightlifting competition. For the time being anyway.
