Chinese to Dominate Women's Weightlifting --Sydney Olympics 2000


Wednesday, September 13

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Chinese to Dominate Women's Weightlifting

If world championship form is anything to go by, the Chinese will walk away from the Olympic women's weightlifting competition with four gold medals and a nagging feeling they could have won more.

In the 13 world championships to date, the women of the People's republic of China have won an astonishing 240 gold medals. To put that achievement into context, regional rivals Taiwan are the next most successful with just 17.

Overall, the Chinese have won 296 in the total medal tally since women's weightlifting made its world championship debut in 1987. The Bulgarians are next best with 118. When women's lifting makes its Olympic Games debut this month, the Chinese will be limited to competing in just four of the seven weight categories.

The exacting Olympic selection process means some of the world's best women's weightlifters will be pumping iron in their gymnasiums in provincial China while the Games unfold.

"Our four entrants here are all gold medal hopes but nothing is certain until it is in your hand," Chinese head coach Wenxi Zhang said as his athletes worked out in a converted military warehouse in suburban Sydney. "However, our goal is certainly four gold's."

China's aspirants are Xia Yang in the 53 kg category, Xiaomin Chen (63 kg), Weining Lin (69 kg) and Meiyuan Ding, reigning world champion and world record holder in the spectacular super heavyweight category of 75 kg plus.

"Women practice weightlifting in every province in China. There are thousands of people involved in the sport," Zhang said. "Chinese women are willing to work hard and submit themselves to the discipline that weightlifting involves."

More women lift weights in the United States than in China but in the US, Zhang said, they do it for bodybuilding. In China, which now has over 300 weightlifting schools and at least 1000 coaches, they practice purely for sport.

China's state sports apparatus regularly plucks potential young weightlifters from the rural provinces, where they have been toughened by physical work since childhood. They are put through years of stamina training before graduating to weights in their early teen years. "The government has been very supportive," Zhang said. "This is a consequence of the good performances we've had at the world championships."

If women had competed at Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta, few doubt the Chinese would have added to their Olympic medal haul. But Zhang said the entry of women's weightlifting into the Olympic fold, 104 years after their male counterparts made their debut, was not necessarily overdue.

"There is a certain process by which the sport must develop. Women's weightlifting has only been a world sport for 13 years so it's only normal it should have waited until now."

Women's weightlifting has been mercifully free of the doping scandals which have tarnished the country's sporting reputation in the past and led to bans on female swimmers.

Zhang was keen to point out that when the Chinese axed a tenth of their squad on the eve of the Sydney Olympics in an apparent crackdown on doping, none of those barred were weightlifters.