Yesterday, in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 6, I examined the events (culture, etc.) surrounding the US’s brief dominance in the sport of Olympic weightlifting, again spanning a period of 12 years from 1948 to 1960. But as I talked about last Friday in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 5, our dominance rapidly disintegrated. From 1960 forwards the sport took a drastic decline that it’s never recovered from.

So having looked at the events that allowed us to be dominant (tho again some think that the US Golden Age is more a myth, just a function of the competition being lower which allowed the US to get away with what they were doing), let’s look at what was going from 1960 forwards.

Make no mistake that a lot was going on and I can’t possibly cover everything. I’d point folks to Bud Charniga’s 6 part series again for a truly comprehensive look at what was going on in the sport both in America and elsewhere, I’ll just try to hit some high points. And the following isn’t meant to be in any sort of order of importance (or even necessarily chronological order though I’ll try to sequence it right), this was all sort of developing at the same time.

A Rule Change in 1964: Thigh Brush Now Ok

Again I want to thank site reader Josh for contacting me to remind me about this, I was aware that this rule had changed but wasn’t sure when it was and didn’t realizes that it coincided quite so nicely with the US’s downturn in the sport. To understand this and why it had such an impact on the sport, I need to explain one of the technical rules of the sport which was this.

In the early days of the sport, one of the rules was that the bar couldn’t actually touch the legs. I don’t know why this rule was in place and it doesn’t matter but this was part of the sport. Among other consequences, this meant that the bar was held slightly in front of the body and, due to that physics thing again, it change the nature of the lifts considerably. First and foremost it slows down the lift since the lever arm relative to the axis of rotation is longer. Secondly, it ends up requiring more upper body strength to control the bar (since the bar is ‘swung out’ from the body).

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 7