“Big Baby” Li Wenwen started weightlifting at the age of ten and began training for the sport at the age of twelve.
The 23-year-old stared at the barbell on the last day of the Olympic Games in the South Paris Arena during the women’s competition in the over 81 kg class. The weight was 173 kg. No one else in the competition had lifted more than 168 kg in the clean and jerk.
More than twice her body weight was no obstacle for the Chinese weightlifter. Wenwen lifted the bar shoulder-high into a racked position, then breathed and let her body fall into a squatting position underneath.
As the bar bent under the weight, Wenwen straightened her legs and finally threw the weight over her head, holding the pose until she was sure she had done the exercise correctly. Finally, she slammed the bar down on the mat and raised her chalky hands in the air.
Korea’s Hyejeong Park finished second and Britain’s Emily Campbell from Nottingham won the bronze medal with Big Baby’s combined 173 kg and 136 kg in the snatch, for a total of 309 kg, slightly behind the world record of 335 kg but enough for the gold medal.
The word is that weightlifting is clean again, a welcome change. Overall, there has been little talk about performance-enhancing drugs (PEDS) over the last three weeks at Paris 2024. Although several athletes have been sent home, the issue has not diverted much attention from what is going on in the pool and on the track.
Not everyone left Paris convinced that people could believe in the Games, but many did. But will it stay that way?
Last week, a Greek athlete tested positive and was ruled out. His name and sport were not disclosed. There were a handful of positive tests during competition, including Commonwealth Games bronze medalist Cynthia Ogunsemilore of Nigeria and Iraqi judo athlete Sajjad Sehn, who tested positive for steroids a day before the Games began.
In March, World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) tests on American athlete Erryion Knighton showed positive results for a banned substance. However, USADA managed to avoid his ban by attributing the ban to meat contamination. Also in Paris were Chinese swimmers who were part of a group of 23 people who tested positive for doping ahead of the Tokyo Olympics.
The United States, the biggest critics of the Chinese swimmers, were quickly accused of hypocrisy.
At the end of the swim, the Chinese swimmers had won two gold, three silver and seven bronze medals, for a total of twelve medals, setting a new record for China in this sport at the Olympic Games. One of the team members, Pan Zhanle, won the title in the men’s 100-meter freestyle by setting a new world record of 46.4 seconds.
On the track, Salwa Eid Naser, who won the silver medal in the women’s 400m in the same race where Ireland’s Rashidat Adeleke finished fourth, was banned for two years in 2020 for multiple reporting violations over a 12-month period, including one reporting violation and three missed tests. The matter ended up before the Court of Arbitration for Sport and Naser was banned until February 2023.
Of course, weightlifting also has its own problems and, along with boxing, is one of the problem children of Olympic sports – boxing for other reasons.
Weightlifting had 565 sanctions between 2008 and 2019 and was only confirmed as one of the sports on the LA 2028 list in October last year. The athlete quota for Paris 2024 has been more than halved compared to Rio 2016.
While testers and labs can only do what they can, the audacity of some athletes remains unchanged. There seems to be no shame in getting caught and returning to the Olympics to get on the winner’s podium.
Countries are bringing athletes back into the team if they believe they have a chance of winning a medal. Attitudes have become more permissive and the ethical aspect no longer seems to play a role. It has gone so far that doping has simply become part of the competition rules.
According to a BBC report last week, Qin Haiyang posted a defiant message on Weibo following China’s swimming pool success.
“Any doubt is just a joke. Stress only makes us stronger,” he said after China’s history-making 4×100-meter medley team defeated the United States to win the gold medal.
It is unlikely that there will ever be a performance-enhancing Olympic Games without performance-enhancing substances, and the London 2012 Games were considered the cleanest ever. By the end of the Games, only nine negative results had been found out of 6,250 tests.
But by the time the samples, which can be kept for ten years, were re-analyzed, the number of positive tests was well over 100, including gold medalists, making the London Games one of the dirtiest in history.
Time delays are now part of the process as testing methods use camouflage and sample history to weed out the cheaters. The downside is that it allows the Olympics to leave in pristine condition and move on to the next city with its reputation intact. If all of those athletes in London had been caught in real time while competing, the outcry would have been game-changing.
As with London, we may not know the true number of negative results from Paris 2024 until LA 2028 starts. That gives us faith in athletes like “Big Baby” and the others in the weightlifting competition. At least for now.
