Qualified: Sarah Robles and Holley Mangold
Weightlifting has always been a male dominated sport. It started in the 1800’s and has lasted for centuries and has increasingly become popular through World Championship competitions. However, women’s Olympic weightlifting had only been implemented at the Olympic Games in 2000 in Sydney Australia, where Tara Nott took home the Gold for the USA Women’s Olympic Weightlifting team.
According to livestrong.com, the very first known female weightlifter was Ivy Russell from England, who started her career as a weightlifter at the age of 14 in 1921. Russell was the first woman to win a weightlifting contest in the 1930’s. It was not until the 1960’s and on that weightlifting competition championships and bodybuilding started to become popular because of athletes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and the popular rise of bodybuilding championships in California. Since then female athletes started to join the championship ranks; Karyn Marshall who competed internationally in (Jakarta, Manchester and Sarajevo) and Judy Glenney who competed in the Women’s National Championships, the Master’s National Championships and the World Master’s championships.
Both women were popular competitors in the early 1980’s and won several championship titles. The rise in popularity among women weightlifters eventually led to the Olympics introducing weightlifting as a competition in 2000. The men’s Olympic Weightlifting has been in place since the late 1800’s.
The qualifications to be an Olympic weightlifting competitor are pretty tough to meet. Countries are able to enter up to 10 athletes into the qualification round split between men and women. There are also individual qualification spots for athletes ranked in the top 15th places within each body weight category.
There are seven different body weight categories in the Olympic games;
– 48 kg (106 lb)
– 53 kg (117 lb)
– 58 kg (128 lb)
– 63 kg (139 lb)
– 69 kg (152 lb)
– 75 kg (165 lb)
– 75 + kg; which the two USA women’s team members are competing in
Olympic Weightlifting is judged by two succinct moves; the “snatch” and “clean and jerk.” According to Olympic format rules; “each lifter is allowed three attempts at the Snatch and three attempts at the Clean and Jerk and their best lift in each is combined to determine their overall result. If an athlete fails to make a valid lift with any of their three attempts in the snatch, they are eliminated. When a tie occurs, the athlete with the lower bodyweight is declared the winner. If two athletes lift the same total weight and have the same bodyweight, the winner is the athlete who lifted the total weight first.”
For the US women’s team, the athletes that will be competing in the 2012 games are Sarah Robles from San Jacinto California who was named “America’s strongest woman” and Holley Mangold, from Dayton Ohio who is popular from her appearance on MTV’s True Life: I’m the big girl, TV documentary and also because she is the younger sister of Jets center Nick Mangold. Both women are competing in the 75+ weight class.
