In my 40 years of experience in Weightlifting, I have often heard the view expressed that Weightlifting really needs to stay in the Olympic Games. It is almost universally believed that loss of "Olympic Games" status would have a tragically detrimental impact on the sport in terms of participation, relevance to the community and funding.
This possibility has seemed very real at times when there are so many sports, with much greater participation, clamouring for entry into the Olympic Games. I might add, however, that there have been no recent whispers that Weightlifting would exit the Games any time soon. So don't be alarmed at what I am about to say.
Sometimes I have wondered whether the difficulty of the sport of Weightlifting to develop participation was because of the Olympic Games. Now, don't get me wrong I think it is fanstastic when anybody gets to go to the Olympics. It is a life changing experience. But maybe the sport has focussed its energies too heavily on the elitism pathway.
For most of my 40 years of exerience, there has also been a widespread assumption that the difficulty in developing participation was due to the very nature of the sport. It is a tough sport, you have to train really hard and it only suits people who have a genetic predisposition. Furthermore, coaches tended to focus recruitment on "schools" i.e. recruit young people in the 13-16 age bracket. Then, if the recruits were any good, encourage them to steadily increase training to 5 days a week for many years and, hey presto, you might just get a national champion.
Well this is right, of course, if you are focussing on the elite end of the sport. But then came Crossfit, a sport/fitness activity that includes competitive weightlifting.
I think I am right in saying that us Weightlifting coaches are really impressed by the extent of interest in Weightlifting that has been generated by Crossfit. I cannot remember any time when the sport was besieged by people desperate to learn Weightlifting technique, and to get the secrets of success from Australia's best Weightlifting coaches.
Who wants to learn Weightlifting technique? The list includes Crossfit athletes, Crossfit coaches, fitness professionals, sport strength and conditioning coaches, sport coaches in general, exercise physiologists, physiotherapists, army physical training instructors and the list goes on.
There is a market out there just to coach people to be technically competent. The overwhelming majority of people are just interested in Weightlifting because they love the thrill of lifting weights skillfully. Most are quite content to adopt weightlifting lifts into their training as a means to pursue personal health and fitness.
I am sure that many managers of the sport of Weightlifting still mostly believe that we would be dead in the water without the Olympics. But I wonder. It has taken another organisation and another sport to show us what we could have done all along ourselves.
It would be undesirable for Weightlifting to be dropped from the Olympics but, should this happen, we now have greater confidence that we could go on from strength to strength as a non-Olympic sport.
Pictures of author as a weightlifter
