I’m writing this on the balcony patio of my hotel room in the Anaheim Hilton, and the 2017 American Open is in full swing. I’m here to coach for the weekend, as usual. But this hasn’t been a normal American Open weekend because the World Championship was just held last week at this same location. The convention center where we’re having the Open was the same venue for the Worlds, and the final weight class of the competition just wrapped up about four days ago. Anaheim has been weightlifting central for quite a while now.
 
What I want to do in this article is share some highlights, thoughts, and just kind of a general “state of the union” about where we (USA Weightlifting) and the sport in general (Olympic weightlifting) are at right now. It’s been one hell of a year for the sport of weightlifting…this sport you’re all involved in. Some things have changed, big time. Will those changes stick, or will things go back to the way they’ve been in the past? Are we seeing an overhaul time period in weightlifting, after so many years of same-old-same-old?
 
And what am I even talking about? I’m going to assume most of you keep up at least a little bit with the goings-on in Olympic weightlifting, so hopefully you’ve got some basic idea what I’m getting at. If you don’t, I’ll explain everything enough to make sure you’re not lost in this article.
 
If you’re not a weightlifting fan, you don’t care about what happened at the Worlds, and you’re just looking for some general information to make yourself a better weightlifter, does this article offer you anything? Sure it does. You see, all these things I’m talking about affect ALL of us, even if you’re just a garage-level weightlifter who’s never going to pop up at a national championship. You might not believe it, and you might not see it, but weightlifting is a sport where many of the things that happen at the top levels actually trickle down to the lower levels in a completely real way. The point I’m trying to make is that you’ve got a stake in this situation, regardless of what level of weightlifting you’re at. Read on, and I’ll show you what I mean.
 
Team USA
 
First of all, this was the most successful World Championship for the United States in generations. We’re not a country that usually wins medals at this level, but we got it done this time. Harrison Maurus and Mattie Rogers both won medals in their weight classes, with Mattie being very close to the win. Sarah Robles won the gold medal in her weight class, making her the first World Champion for the US since Robin Byrd in 1994. Teenage phenom CJ Cummings had a bad day in the C&J and bombed out, but he likely would have won a medal if he had been at his normal level of performance (possibly even the gold). Bad days happen. Several of our other athletes, like Olympian Jenny Arthur, placed very high in their weight classes and gave our country its best Worlds finish in a very, very long time.
 
Why did Team USA have such a huge performance? Well, you might already know one of the main reasons. This is the year the International Weightlifting Federation suspended several of the top countries in the sport for continual doping violations. Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and several other repeat offenders weren’t at this World Championship. The lifters from these countries have tested positive for drugs so many times over the last few years, they’ve plunged weightlifting into a steroid scandal that’s risen to a level of full-blown crisis, and the International Olympic Committee has started threatening to toss weightlifting out of the Olympic Games if the sport doesn’t clean up its act. As a response to the threat from the IOC, the IWF decided to make a serious move and ban the big-time drug countries from international competition for a year.
 
You can do the math. With many of the top counties out of the competition, USA had a big opportunity to move up. For many of us who have been in this sport for decades, this was a sweet moment because we’ve been saying for years that our national program is basically clean, and if you take out the countries who are cheating us by using drugs, we’re a lot closer to the top of the world rankings than most people think. This World Championship proved it, at least somewhat. We didn’t dominate the competition, but we were certainly up near the top. (It’s also important to remember that although several countries with huge drug track records got suspended for this year, there were still several other countries with well-known doping records who avoided the IWF’s ban and got to compete. I really want to hammer this point home. The playing field was more level than usual, but still a looooong way from completely fair.)
 
So the big million-dollar question is obviously still hanging out there. Was this suspension of the drug countries a one-time thing? Will they be back in action next year, and all the years to follow, putting up massive lifts (fueled by illegal performance enhancing drugs) and pushing the US back down the ladder? Or is this the turning of the tide? Is the sport actually, truly, seriously…changing?
 
I don’t have an answer to that, and neither does anybody else. But I’m telling you right now, if the sport of weightlifting doesn’t seriously clean up its act, we’ll get booted from the Olympics. The IOC has flirted with the idea of dropping us from the Olympic program in the past (see “Bulgarian steroid scandal 1988 Olympics”) and after the avalanche of positive drug tests that popped up in 2015 on the Olympic retests, we’re in more trouble than ever.
 
But I digress. I’ve written about this whole situation more than once. If you follow my articles, you’ve heard much of this before, so I don’t want to repeat the same points over and over. However, there’s a different direction we can take this. And this is where we apply it to all of you, like I said we would.
 
American Training
 
One of the things you get used to in Olympic weightlifting is the common notion that the Chinese and Russians have the secret keys to the kingdom, in terms of training and coaching. Because of the incredible level of performance by these countries year after year, people come to believe they’re the only ones with a true, legitimate understanding of how to train weightlifters.
A blunter way to put it is this: many people in this sport think the coaches from China, Russia, and other countries at their level are the true masters of the sport, while American coaches are incompetent. Unfortunately, you get used to hearing it. I’ve written about this before, too.
 
That leads me to you. Many of you jump on the internet and run to the training practices you see on YouTube from these top international countries, while completely disregarding anything weightlifting-related with the term “American” attached to it. Why would anybody want to learn about weightlifting from an American coach? Americans suck at weightlifting. Their coaches obviously aren’t any good, so why should we listen to them? Blah blah.
 
The point I’m trying to make should be obvious. If you take drugs out of the picture, and I mean REALLY out of the picture, our lifters would look a lot better than they do when they’re compared to lifters from the drug-system countries. Mattie Rogers, Harrison Maurus, CJ Cummings, and Sarah Robles are all coached by American weightlifting coaches. These guys have learned a thing or two from the methodology of other countries, for sure. But they’ve all had to develop their own systems. These are homegrown American weightlifters produced by American coaches. And if you take drugs out of the picture, even just PARTIALLY out of the picture, they’re among the best in the world. Contrary to what the naysayers think, we’re not a bunch of nincompoops who don’t know anything about weightlifting.
 
The message here is that there are plenty of great resources right here in the good old US of A. And for those of you who are reading this article from outside the country, the same point applies. Change your mentality about what’s going on in this sport, and who the experts are. Believe it or not, we’ve got plenty of experts here in America who don’t have to take a backseat to anybody in the coaching world, and I mean ANYBODY.
 
Hope is a dangerous thing
 
Man, I really hope things are seriously changing. I would love to see the United States rise back to the top of the weightlifting world in my lifetime. That would be swell. I’m not even talking about dominating the world scene. I would settle for simple respect.
 
But I don’t know. China, Russia, and many of the other countries that got suspended this year have weightlifting systems that are firmly entrenched in the sports cultures of their countries. They’re not going to get rid of weightlifting, and they’re not going to stop expecting gold medals at the Worlds and Olympics. That means, unfortunately, they’re probably not going to stop using drugs. I would find it easier to believe that they’ll just pump more money and resources into beating the tests in the future.
 
If all of those things happen, and international weightlifting goes back to status quo, our US lifters might get pushed back down the ladder, and we might go back to the same lack of respect we’ve gotten for decades in the iron sports community. It would be a shame to see this happen because this year should have convinced at least a few people that we’re not quite as lousy as we’ve looked in the past when we’re compared to leviathan weightlifting programs with government-funded doping systems.
 
All I’m trying to do is get you to see things differently from how you’ve possibly been led to look at them throughout your time in this sport. You want to be better weightlifters and coaches. That’s why you’re reading this magazine. But you’re often convinced that you have to look overseas to get anything valuable, and that’s a shame. I’ve trained with the top coaches from some of these countries we’re talking about, and I’ve trained with many of the top coaches in this country. I can tell you with certainty that we’re all basically doing the same thing. The only difference is the weightlifting systems that exist in these places, not the coaches in those systems. We’ve got resources for your weightlifting career in the United States that hold up against anywhere, so don’t be afraid to broaden your mind and use what’s out there to make yourself better. I sincerely hope the results we see in future years continue to show all this to be true.