We’re almost done as my goal is to wrap this up by Friday.  Yesterday in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 7, I looked at a bunch of factors that took the US from it’s dominant heyday in the 40’s and 50’s to almost rans almost overnight.  Certainly the rise of the Eastern European countries was part of this but it wasn’t all that was going on.

The sport had changed due to a rules change along with the dropping of the press (in 1974) and Americans, still fascinated with maximum strength and muscle size hadn’t changed.  Other changes in the gym culture of the day, the rise of bodybuilding, machine training and other strength sports (powerlifting, strongman) along with the big three starting to throw stupid money at its athletes just further diluted any talent that might have pursued OL’ing.

The sport, never more than a niche to begin with had begun it’s downward spiral.  What facilities existed started to disappear as the sport declined, incoming lifters went into other activities, the teachings (such as they were) of coaching and technique were lost, results declined, further decreasing interest.  The magazines didn’t cover the sport, nobody cared.

And that’s led us to where we are today and, in essence, this part of the series is sort of the ‘punchline’ to all of this (the part that everybody wish I’d started with) although I won’t stop here because I want to address not only some recent developments but other things that might change the situation (if it’s changeable at all).  And while some of what I’m going to write will probably have been ‘obvious’ to everyone from the start, hopefully you’ll see that not all of it.  And why I spent 5 weeks getting to this point.

And as I continue today, this is where the simpletons who stopped after Part 1 of this series will say “See, this is all Lyle had to say.”  But they’ll be wrong.  These are the simple answers to the problem of Ol’ing, the ones everybody focuses on while ignoring what I think are bigger issues.  Even the mere existence of people that thing that there is a single, simple problem or fix makes part of my point.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 8