People in weightlifting usually have short memories. I’ve always noticed this. Most of the lifters and coaches in the sport have no idea who the top names were 10 years prior to their time on the scene. They might recognize a few old champions that really stand out, but mostly they only know/care about who’s hot at the moment.
 
And that’s why I’m sure most of you probably don’t know who Angel Genchev is. He’s a weightlifter who was very important a long time ago, but I’m not going to give you the details of his career in the first section of this article. I’ll save that for later. For now, I’m just going to tell you why you should care about his story, and how it can apply to your life.
 
Genchev’s life in weightlifting started decades ago, when the world was a much different place than it is now. He had some incredible moments of triumph, and then he plunged into a swamp of failure that was much more extreme than most of us will ever come close to. Weightlifting failure usually means bad meets, injuries, difficult time periods of frustration, etc. This guy’s situation dwarfed those things in terms of severity.
 
Then he vanished, like the snows of yesteryear. He went through the thing most of us hate thinking about…getting crushed so badly by adversity that we actually have to walk away. And he was gone for a long time. Now he’s back, much older and with much less fame and fortune, but still back.
 
Here’s what I’m getting to, in regards to all of you. Most of you are relatively new to Olympic weightlifting (less than five years of experience). That means your career is probably still on the upswing. Sure, you’ve most likely run into roadblocks, and maybe you’ve even had some detestable stretches that made you want to chuck the whole mess and quit. But overall, you’re still learning and growing, and your goals are still out in front of you. Angel Genchev didn’t run into a temporary roadblock. He got forced out of the entire sport by a bad mistake.
 
Will anything ever force you out of the sport? Hopefully not. But I can guarantee you one thing…if you stay in weightlifting long enough, something will probably force you to move in a different direction from what you originally wanted. Maybe you won’t have to walk away entirely, but you’ll have to change your expectations and thoughts about what you were going to accomplish.
 
THIS is where we can find common ground with the life story of the weightlifter we’re going to examine here. We’re really talking about the idea of having to resort to some kind of Plan B in your weightlifting career. Curveballs are sometimes so extreme, they actually knock you off the straight line you thought you were going to travel in the sport. These are the times when obstacles and challenges force you to think on your feet and figure out a new path and a new way to approach your career if you want to achieve anything important. In other words, we’re going to take a look at the possibility that something might happen in your weightlifting life that stops you from getting what you want. And when these things happen, you’re faced with two options: you can walk away forever, or you can improvise, adapt, and overcome.
 
I don’t want to sound doom-and-gloom, but there’s a high likelihood that you might have to deal with this. Some of you might have already done it. So let’s look at how to handle it, through the tale of a guy who had to live it.
 
#2 All-Time, with an Asterisk…
 
You probably already know this, but there’s a mathematical system in Olympic weightlifting called the Sinclair formula, and it ranks lifters on a pound-for-pound basis. It’s the way we determine who’s the best in the sport, regardless of weight class. If you’ve been to a meet and seen the officials hand out a Best Lifter award to the top overall athlete, that award was determined by ranking everybody in the competition on Sinclair formula.
 
The best performance in the history of Olympic weightlifting is Turkey’s Naim Suleymanoglu totaling 342.5 kg in the old 60 kg weight class at the 1988 Olympics. This total gave him a 500 point Sinclair formula ranking, which is the highest of all time. Naim is the best ever in our sport, no question, hands down, without a doubt, universally agreed.
 
But most people don’t know the second best performance in history happened the day after Naim’s big moment, when Angel Genchev of Bulgaria totaled 362.5 kg in the 67.5 kg class, obviously also at the ’88 Olympics. Genchev was on fire that day at a level you rarely see. Weighing 67.5 kg (148 lbs.), he put up a 160-kg snatch (352 lbs.) and a 202.5 kg C&J (446 lbs.), going six-for-six en route to gold. This was the #2 Sinclair ranking in history. I’ve probably seen the video of this performance a thousand times (it’s on YouTube), and it still knocks me on my butt when I watch it. Naim’s lifting at those Games was the gold standard; we all know that. But when I think back about ’88, I always find myself thinking of Angel Genchev. The sheer intensity and fierceness of his lifting was from another planet. Thirty years later, nobody in the 69 kg weight class (which replaced the old 67.5 class) has topped that 362.5 total.
 
So…why don’t more people know about this magnificent accomplishment? Because a few days after it happened, Genchev’s drug test came back positive for a diuretic. He was stripped of his gold medal, his total was erased from the record books, and he was banned from the sport along with his Bulgarian teammate Mitko Grablev, who had also tested positive earlier in that week. The Bulgarian team, which was the best in the world at the time, had to withdraw from the Games and return home in shame. Those of you with a little knowledge of weightlifting history already know all of this. For those of you who are new, I’m telling you about the biggest drug scandal weightlifting has ever seen.
 
Angel Genchev simply faded off into the mist after this was over. He didn’t make a comeback after his suspension was done, and we never heard from him again. For the last three decades, his name has stayed in the weightlifting consciousness of that era for two opposite reasons…the greatness of his performance and the disgrace of the Bulgarian scandal. None of us from the old days ever forgot him, but as far as the sport was concerned, he became a campfire legend. I honestly didn’t know if he was alive or dead, until…
 
Thank God for the Masters Division…
 
In 2017, without any fanfare or public announcement, Angel Genchev showed up at the World Masters Games. I didn’t know about it until a few months after it happened, when I randomly stumbled across a YouTube video of his performance. He competed in the 50-54 age group, 77 kg bodyweight class. How did he do? About what you would expect. He won his division by 35 kilos, hitting a 95 kg snatch and 125 kg C&J. After all those years and all the controversy that exiled him from the sport, he came back to the platform and dominated.
 
You have to understand how rare this is. First of all, elite lifters who win World and Olympic championships rarely come back to compete in the masters division. It happens sometimes, but not often. Athletes who have won these kinds of titles have been through hell. They start lifting when they’re young kids, train at a level of physical and mental torture that would kill most people in the world, win gold medals, and then retire. Weightlifting was a job for them because of their level of performance, and most of them have no more interest in continuing to lift than a ditch digger would have in picking up a shovel after he gets his pension.
 
Second, athletes who test positive for drugs often don’t come back, especially under the kind of circumstances Genchev experienced. He was an elite lifter in an old-school Eastern Bloc communist system, and he was one of the centerpieces of a national scandal that Bulgarian weightlifting never fully recovered from. There are a hundred moving parts in that equation that would make it completely understandable to never step on a competition platform again.
 
Yet despite all of that, Genchev made a return. Personally, I love it. I love the fact that he obviously never lost the love he had for lifting weights. I love that his competitive spirit never died. I love the fact that he clearly wanted to avenge himself, in some way. I don’t know Angel Genchev and I can’t speak for what’s been going on in his mind and soul for the last three decades. But the fact that he came back and competed again tells us a lot. Something deep down inside him always wanted to get back on that platform, to regain some kind of pride and joy from the sport that gave him unimaginable triumph and pain within the space of a few days back in 1988. I guess I love knowing that it never stopped eating at him, and he decided to do something many people don’t do after a crushing defeat. He walked straight through all the negativity and made himself a champion again. I don’t mind telling you his masters comeback is one of my favorite weightlifting stories in a very long time.
 
So…you
 
If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you know I write a lot of stuff about fighting through adversity, recovering from injuries and defeats, etc. Those topics are always in demand in Olympic weightlifting, so I try to offer a lot of thoughts and strategies to help people win the battles that come with the territory in this sport.
 
However, the focus of this article is slightly different. In this particular case, we’re talking about dealing with situations where some kind of roadblock pops up in your career and forces you to take a detour. You don’t want to take the detour because you had a clear path all planned out and you knew exactly where you were going. You were in control. But when you have to take a detour, you don’t know exactly where you’re going. You still know where you want to end up, but the process of getting there is different from what you thought it was going to be, and you’ve lost some of the certainty and control you started with.
 
How does this happen to us in weightlifting? There are multiple ways your little rowboat can get knocked off course in this game, but let me give you two common examples:
 
1) Athletic- Reaching a point in your career when you realize you’re probably not going to accomplish something you wanted when you started, either because of injury or simply falling short on talent and ability.
 
2) Coaching- Having talented athletes with tremendous potential and getting your hopes up about the heights you’re going to get them to, and then losing them because they quit or move to another coach.
 
I’m not trying to sound doom-and-gloom, but these are both extremely frequent. Most athletes have goals they never quite get to. This isn’t a bad thing, by the way. You’re supposed to dream huge and push as hard as you can to get to the top. If you fall short, it’s okay because the reward is actually the journey (I know that’s cliché, but it’s true). And when you’re a coach, you’ll lose studs at some point. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’ll happen. Ask any coach who’s been in the business for a good amount of time.
 
As I said, there are lots of other ways we can get derailed in weightlifting. These are just two examples. Think about your own time in the sport for a second. Has something already happened to you that qualifies as a forced detour? I have a feeling I’m hitting close to home.
 
What are we supposed to do in these situations? We’re supposed to do what Angel Genchev did. We’re supposed to hang in there. You’d be amazed at how many great things can happen in this sport simply by staying in the game and outlasting everybody else. Genchev’s story is exceptionally remarkable because he obviously spent a lifetime away before coming back to the action three decades after his career got shut down. That’s something that I think we can learn quite a bit from. His forced detour was about as severe as any of us could ever imagine. He was literally kicked out of the sport in disgrace when he was at the pinnacle of success. Most of us will probably never experience a moment of disappointment that awful, thank god.
 
But he hung in there. And now he’s back, winning world titles in the masters division. Obviously, the greatness of a masters world championship isn’t within a million miles of an Olympic gold medal, but we can learn something from that, too. When we get derailed from our original goals, we often have to search around for a different kind of success. This is what often happens when athletes go on to become coaches. Their lifting careers come to an end and they have to accept that it’s over…but then they find a way to make sure it’s not really over. I know a lot of former lifters who have gone on to higher levels of success as coaches than they ever had when they were competitors. That’s what I’m talking about. You simply stay in the game, retooling your expectations and goals as you go. It’ll require different thinking than you’re used to, and you might have to be creative in the way you go about it, but that’s part of the fun. Coming up with fresh new targets to chase is invigorating. It gives you a new life and new passions.
 
If you’re a coach and you lose studs, just keep coaching. If you’re really worth a damn, you’ll build a new one. If you’re an athlete and you get stopped short of your ultimate dreams, create some new ones. They might not be quite as glittery as the ones you originally wanted, but take it from me and Angel Genchev…they’ll still feel incredible, and your life will be better because you found them.