Ok, believe it or not, all of the truly long pieces are done until I get to the US.  Having spent two days on UK Track Cycling, finishing on Tuesday in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 5, I promise not to spend more than one day on any one group until I get to the US.  That’s gonna be long.  At this point it would be a bit redundant to just keep making the same points over and over again.  So I’ll be a bit briefer so I can look at more groups faster.

So over the next few parts, I want to take more of a snapshot of a variety of different sport systems that have shown success or outright dominance in various time frames.  And since it makes some logical sense, I’m actually going to look at them in somewhat of a chronological order (that is, in terms of the times they were dominant) since this makes some other points about changes in training and focus some of which I feel are relevant to my ultimate topic of US Ol’ing.

In series, I’m going to talk about the Russian Sports machine today, Bulgarian OL’ing, East Germany and, of all things, Australian swimming on Friday and then finish by looking at the most recent sports machine, Communist China, on Monday.  Then, finally I can turn my eye to the US and spend too much time getting to the point.

So today, we turn our eye to the former Soviet Sports machine.  And since I’m a dumb American as I pointed out on Tuesday, I will be incorrectly using terminology ranging from USSR to the Soviet Union to Russia interchangeably.  I know these are all subtly different but I can’t be bothered to worry about it or even Wikipedia it.  You know what I’m talking about and that’s the former Soviet Sports Machine that dominated sport for at least a solid 20 years.

Definition of Dominance

I couldn’t put a date to it but around the 1950’s to the 1970’s, the Russians/Soviet Union started to get really interested in sports, showing success in many and outright dominating some others; they won some incomprehensible number of Olympic medals during their heyday and did so in an amazingly broad number of sports (not the least of which was Olympic lifting), both summer and winter.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 6