Ok, this will be the finish no matter how long it takes; and it will be long but I have to move on to other things.  Coming straight out of Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Ol’ing Part 9, I want to shift gears.  Because most of what I covered over the past two days had mostly to do with why the sport is as small as it is: a lack of facilities, coaching, incentives and, ultimately, interest.

But in that way, OL’ing is not terribly different than a lot of marginalized sports in this country that exist under literally identical conditions of few athletes, no access, etc.  And yet in some we succeed brilliantly; in others we medal sporadically (even one of our rowers won in Beijing and that sport is as niche as it gets).  Clearly if all the problems with OL’ing were related to the issues of the last two days it would cut universally across all niche sports and it does not.  There must be other factors at play and that’s the topic of today.

Because irrespective of all of the factors that exist to keep OL’ing no more than a niche sport in this country, there has always been a small group of elite lifters in this country, who despite the title of this series, have performed to varying degrees at the highest level, placing Top 10 (with a couple of guys coming close to cracking the medal stand, Barnett’s 4th in 1996 being the closest but I’ll come back to that below).

These are the folks already in the sport so the discussion of the past 2 days doesn’t apply to them; they are the ones who have devoted their lives to the sport and reached at least a high enough level to make the big show to see what, if anything might be holding them back.

Is It Simply a Lack of Talent?

Perhaps the simplest answer to the problem with the elites that America has is that they simply may not have the talent to reach the highest level.  This is actually the place I am really in no place to comment.  Certainly, other big sports in this country do tend to draw top strength/power athletes for reasons I discussed at length and this is certainly part of it.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 10