Let’s take a little trip back in time, shall we? The year was 1994. The internet was about two years old, Bill Clinton was our president, Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, OJ was getting ready to kill his wife, and I felt like killing somebody when I stepped off the plane in SeaTac airport. I was returning from the Olympic Festival, which is a meet that doesn’t exist anymore but used to be the biggest competition in the United States. You had to be specially selected for this one, you got an all-expense paid trip to go to it, opening and closing ceremonies, etc. It was huge. I was 22 years old, and I got picked to lift in the Festival that year. Total career highlight stuff. And I bombed out in the snatch.
 
Needless to say, I was in a prickly mood when I came home to Seattle afterwards. To make it even more annoying, I was traveling with two teammates of mine who had both competed in it too, both of them kicking ass and winning medals. So I got to be the loser of the bunch.
 
A friend of ours named Sam Maxwell picked us up at the airport to drive us home. Sam was a former elite US lifter who had competed all over the world, broken US records, etc. He hadn’t heard how we did at the meet, so we all filled him in on our results. I got to have that wonderful moment we’ve all experienced at some point, where you put up a complete failure performance, and then you get to come home and experience it all over and over again when your friends come up to you and ask, “So how did you do?!” I wasn’t looking forward to telling Sam about it, because he wasn’t exactly a sensitive personality. I was expecting some kind of wiseass comment when I told him how I did, but it didn’t go that way. He just smiled and said to me, “Hey man, everybody bombs.”
 
He was right, you know. If you were to make up a ranking list of the greatest weightlifters in the history of the sport (Suleymanoglu, Dimas, Alexeev, etc.), that’s the one thing you would find they all have in common. They all bombed out at some point in their careers. I actually don’t think I’ve ever met a high-level national or international lifter who hasn’t felt the sting of the bomb at least once. American legend Chad Vaughn bombed out at the Olympics. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
 
Since almost all of you are competitive lifters or coaches, you need to get a proper perspective on bombouts. I don’t want to predict doom and gloom, but there’s a decent chance you’ll have an experience with this if you compete long enough and push the envelope hard enough. I think there are only two main questions you need to look at regarding bombouts. 1) Why did it happen? 2) How can you stop it from happening again?
 
So that’s what we’re going to do in this article, plain and simple. I don’t want this to happen to you (unless you’re competing against me), so I’ll offer some thoughts on the subject.
 
Why do bombouts happen?

First of all, let’s understand something. Olympic weightlifting is a sport where you’re attempting to do the most complicated physical barbell tasks known to man: the snatch, and the clean and jerk. When you’re doing these lifts with heavy weights, there’s almost zero margin for error. In competition, you’re trying to lift the heaviest weights you can possibly handle, in the most pressure-packed conditions imaginable, and you only get three chances at it. If you blow it on any of these three chances, you can’t lower the weight and try something lighter that would be easier to make. And you wonder why bombouts happen? For God’s sake, look at what I just wrote. That’s a tough little trick to pull off.
 
Still, the vast majority of weightlifting performances don’t result in bombouts. Through proper training and preparation, most lifters are able to put it together on the platform enough to at least make one snatch and one clean and jerk, resulting in a competition total.
 
So bombouts aren’t exceptionally frequent. They happen, but they’re the minority percentage of competition results. Personally, I’ve competed in 113 meets in my career, and only five of those were bombouts. That’s a 96 percent success rate. I’d prefer 100 percent, but that’s life, isn’t it?
 
Back to the question, “Why do bombouts happen?” Unfortunately, there’s no way I can answer this with complete accuracy. Do you know why? Because there are a zillion possible reasons why bombouts can happen, and they’re all completely specific to the situation.
 
However, I do have some thoughts that can point your thinking in the right direction. Without a doubt, the single biggest cause of bombouts is mental error on the part of the lifter. It’s that simple. I bombed out of five meets, and that was the cause of each one. I wasn’t attempting weights I was incapable of lifting. I didn’t open too high. My coach didn’t screw anything up. In each case, I failed with weights I should have been able to lift because I didn’t get my job done psychologically. Nobody’s fault but mine. If you talked to every lifter who’s ever bombed out, I suspect most of them would say the same thing.
 
The second most frequent cause of bombouts is improper weight selection on your competition attempts. Sometimes, bombouts happen because the athlete is simply opening way too high. Let me give you an example: I’ve known three lifters in my career who routinely picked their opening attempts in competition with weights that were significantly heavier than what they’d been able to lift in training. One guy used to open with around 115 kg in the snatch in almost every meet he competed in. I trained with this dude full time, and I can’t recall ever seeing him hit more than 110 kg in the gym. And 110 kg wasn’t a consistent weight, either. He often hit a wall at 105 kg. And on the days when he made 110, he usually missed it two or three times before making it. So after all this, he would go to meets and start with 115. I think I saw him bomb out of eight or nine meets in a row, something like that.
 
This guy didn’t have a coach, so the bonehead decisions were always entirely on his shoulders. However, what if we’re talking about a situation where the improper weight selection in competition is happening because of the coach? I’ve seen this too. I knew another guy who basically never snatched over 120 kg in training, and his coach would start him at 125-130 kg every meet. Once again, this guy’s career had more bombouts than totals.
These two examples are situations where the bombouts are happening basically because of stupidity. Sorry, there’s really no other way to describe it. I’m not saying these guys were stupid, but I am saying they were making stupid decisions. However, let’s remember that stories like this are rare. I’ve trained with thousands of lifters and coaches in my career, and I can only remember a few that were this ridiculous. The vast majority of people in this sport approach it with sensible planning and preparation. That means the bombouts are more frequently caused by the first culprit, athlete mental error. And dammit, that makes everything a lot more complicated.
 
How can you stop bombouts from happening again?
 
If they’re happening because of improper weight selection in competition, it’s an easy fix. Just go to Home Depot, buy a crowbar, and use it to pull your head out of your ass. Start making better decisions about your meet attempts, and guess what? You’ll probably have a pretty good chance of totaling!
 
We don’t need to waste much more time on the silly ones. What we need to devote our attention to are those complicated situations where lifters and coaches do absolutely everything right up until the moment of failure. Solid training, sensible attempt selection, perfectly timed warmups, etc. It’s all running like clockwork until that lifter passes by the chalk box and walks onto the competition stage. If the bombouts happen in this situation, it’s because something isn’t going right between the lifter’s ears.
 
Asking me to diagnose every bombout in an article is like having a stranger walk up to me on the street and ask me what’s wrong with his marriage. How the hell should I know? I’ve never even met you. But after a few decades of experience in this sport, I can certainly give you a list of five strong candidates for the source of a bombout. Here they are:
 
The lifter isn’t ready for stage conditions
 
One of my favorite blues songs goes, “Bright lights, big city…going to my head.” In Olympic weightlifting, it’s more like “bright lights, big crowds…going to my head.” Listen, the prime-time atmosphere just flat out rattles some people if they’re not used to it. I hated meets with spotlights on the platform and dark audience lighting. Freaked the hell out of me. And I definitely lifted badly at a couple of them…until I got used to it. Experience usually clears this one up.
 
Too much control of environment in training
 
If the lifter makes the mistake of being one of those, “I gotta have MY music playing, on MY platform, with MY bar, and nobody better walk in front of me while I’m lifting!” people, it can get ugly in competition, where the entire environment is set up to throw curveballs at you. If you can’t lift big weights outside your comfort zone, you’re probably gonna be screwed on meet day. Do yourself a big favor and mix a lot of things up in training. Bars, platforms, everything. Train yourself to handle curveballs.
 
Simple lack of confidence
 
Listen, getting mentally rattled and pissing down your leg is nothing to be ashamed of. Actually…I take that back. It’s definitely something to be ashamed of. But don’t write yourself off as a head case if it happens. It’s part of the process. The Lifting Gods reach down from the heavens and touch all of us at some point, saying, “Yes, my child. You too will suffer.” Just keep bouncing back. Go listen to that Rocky speech where he says it’s all about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Get it tattooed in a foreign language on your ribcage like people do these days.
 
Thinking about too many things-
 
Want to hear the best advice I can give you about mental concentration when it comes to technique cues? Pick two. That’s it. If you try to think about more than two, you won’t be able to do it. Pick two.
 
Over-psyching
 
This is the opposite of fear and nervousness. It’s when the athlete simply gets too revved up. The adrenaline and intensity boil over. Think about it like you’re boiling water on a stove. If you turn the heat up too high, the water bubbles up over the edges of the pot and spills all over the burner. You’re trying to find that perfect level, where the temperature is running hot enough to get the job done, but not enough to go over the edge. Most of the best lifters in the world have a perfect blend of intensity and calm going on. That’s what you need.
 
And a thousand other things
 
You might be thinking about a personal bombout that you’ve either had or coached. Maybe the reason was something I didn’t mention. That’s understandable. Like I said earlier, there are a million possible causes for bombs.
 
Can a bombout ever be caused by somebody else, or by the competition staff? It’s possible but extremely rare. We would have to be talking about a severe screw up by the people in charge of the meet, and it would have to happen three times in a row to the same lifter. Like I said, this isn’t something you’re going to see very often.
 
Unfortunately, something you DO see a little too often is lifters who want to point fingers and blame somebody after a bombout. If there’s anything I want you to take away from this article, it’s a resistance to that. Don’t ever point fingers after you fail in this sport. Put the blame entirely on yourself. That’s the only way you’ll ever make it to the top of your ability. Blaming yourself is most likely the correct diagnosis, and it gives you something to fix.
 
Any time I had a bad competition, either a bombout or just a lousy meet, I went through a mental checklist to try to find the cause. I always thought about it like trying to find the problem in a car engine that’s making a funny noise. The noise is happening because one of the parts of the engine isn’t running right. You don’t know what it is, so you just have to check all of them. Check the radiator. Is anything wrong with it? No? Then check the gaskets. Is anything wrong with them? You get the idea.
 
Go through your performance the same way. Was it your nutrition? No? How about your sleep? Not that either? Were you injured, or feeling close to an injury? No? Did you do anything significantly different from your normal routine? Just keep checking every part of the engine until you find the problem. It’s in there somewhere.
 
I think lifters usually know exactly what happened, and I think it’s almost always one of those five causes I listed earlier. 90 percent of the time, I think it’s simple mental stuff. As a coach, sometimes you can see the bombouts coming a mile away. It’s just obvious that the lifter doesn’t have it upstairs. Other times, it shocks the hell out of you.
 
The important thing to finish with is simple resilience. You have to pick yourself up and keep fighting. Every time I ever had a bad meet, I wanted to lift in another meet the next weekend. I couldn’t wait to get out there and avenge myself. This is how it should be. I’m not saying you should frantically compete again immediately after a bad performance. I’m saying you should have the fighting spirit that makes you want to get revenge. Bad days will happen, brothers and sisters. It’s part of the life you’ve chosen. Nobody gets a free pass, no matter how talented they are. If a bombout happens, get pissed about it. Then figure out why it happened. Then go back to work, hungry to make it right next time. At the end of the day, that’s all any of us can do.