After all the rumors there is finally something official to report from Liao Hui.
6 months after he, rather bluntly, announced his retirement from weightlifting, Liao Hui said he will give weightlifting another shot and prepare for Tokyo 2020!
Sources (they all pretty much say the same thing):
2016 will have a good end!
this is a truly great news
So… basically that retirement was about as long as a normal off period LOL. They basically all “retired” for about this long after Rio! And this seems to support that he basically “retired” because he was so fed up at the corruption that resulted in Shi Zhiyong going instead of him, taking his double Olympic Champion title away. It’s when you rage-quit a game because your character died but you’ll be back in a day or 2 LOL
Biggest question in my mind is whether he will continue as a 69 or go up to 77. Shi is a solid 69 for China and Lu Xiaojun looked burnt out on his clean and jerk in Rio. Su Ying looked poised to take Lu’s spot after his 170+200 performance in the 2015 Nationals but then he got injured and went downhill. If Lu Xiaojun is truly ready to pack up and go spend time with his family, then China needs a good 77.
If Lu retires, Liao will have to replace him, no question. I honestly believe he could c&j 215 as a full 77
I dunno. His natural size is 73kg and he didn’t make 211 at that weight. Adding on 4kg above what you are normally gonna weigh when training may not necessarily give much or any benefit. But that’s also what I thought when Ilya moved to 105 so I could be wrong…
i think he didnt get that 211 just cuz it was 20 kilo jump
I don’t think so. 211 would have been a PR for him. He’s made 210 twice or 3 times in training. If the jump was the problem, then he should have realized that and since he had 2 left, put in a 200-202 in between before going to 211 or just opened higher than 190. He put 190 in there as a med-heavy warm up for himself so he was conditioned to feeling heavy weight but still didn’t expend too much energy. That’s the perfect mode for PRing or at least making a huge lift. He was also lifting in China. No pressure from the competition. All the odds were in his favor and set up for that lift to succeed. And he still didn’t make it. So at this point, 215 would be a big reach for me to believe. BUT he also did not train as a 77. He was training as a 69. If he trained as a 77 and had time to fill out the size class, he could be significantly stronger. But, he could also hit a block like Aukhadov, who wanted to go up to 94 but simply could not grow that much lean mass. Remember, as a 77, you would ideally fill out to 79 or 80 and drop to 77.
we’ll see in 2020, but i think the atmosphere at the Olympics can effect how much weight he’ll lift
Nobody wants to see Liao Hui do 215 more than me LOL. And after he does it, I wanna see him parody (if that’s possible at all) the dance that Rahimov did in Rio haha
lmao that would be legendary 🙂
Shi Zhiyong’s face at the news: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/078acd178a68db1b65acd7050e7db71769770d15ce32169e36c85f08a06334a0.jpg
Shi Zhiyong’s face when he hears Liao is coming back as a 77: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a03d61313cb869d64f12f2a3363118e033dabb58c8e52ec8325af226b96a8e82.jpg
He will not lift in Tokyo. Why would the internal iron fist that kept him out of Rio suddenly disappear?
Jakarta 2018 and world records should be the goal.
1. Who’s to say Shi Zhiyong will still be healthy in 2020? I certainly hope so but his explosive style of lifting doesn’t look like one that lasts well with age.
2. What class will Liao enter as? He may enter as a 77 since Lu Xiaojun will in all likelihood be retired before 2020. If there are no good young 77’s, then he’s an obvious choice.
3. Who kept Liao out of Rio? Will that slimy bastard still be around in 2020? China’s anti-corruption drive lynches a worthless shithead like that every week.
can you elaborate on why Shi Zhiyong’s style and why it is so unhealthy even for weightlifters?
Well, he has a lot of explosive power as he flings the bar up in the pull and he catches it pretty high without going into full squat. Same for the jerk. This style emphasizes explosive power and speed over strength and as you get older the first thing that goes is speed; you can hold onto strength for much longer. If he gets older and a loss of speed starts to cause him to not fling the bar high enough (even if just by a little), he can’t power-clean it. If he doesn’t power clean it, he won’t have the reserve strength to send it high enough in the jerk. Also, the incredibly fast acceleration the lifter puts on the bar using the speed-intensive style causes greater forces to be exerted on the joints and other soft tissue (bone was well) of the lifter, thereby increasing their rate of wear and chances of injury.
Lu Xiaojun uses the opposite style, where his pulls/jerks are more calm and smooth but he goes all the way under in a full squat and uses leg strength to raise it. This is a very strength-intensive style and Lu Xiaojun is known for his leg strength, hence Lu’s ability to lift into his later years. Also, the extra reserve strength is useful for correcting the lift when something small goes wrong as seen in Lu’s ability to save his 202kg jerk in Rio and final 200kg jerk in Incheon.
Luis Mosquera uses a technique similar and even more exaggerated than Shi Zhiyong in the sense that it is all dependent on explosive speed and his ability to savagely fling the bar very high and catch it in power position to save energy. If anything goes wrong at all; if the bar doesn’t get high enough and he needs to pause for a moment even in power position, the lift is usually botched on the jerk. Mosquera’s career height has already passed and he is what, 21? Barely out of junior division.
Shi is only 23-24, his coaches are probably aware of this. I don’t know whether they would get him to change his style though, he’s probably ingrained that technique into his muscle memory since his was a kid. I would say that his style, for the most part, is more consistent that Lu’s or Tian’s, who rely more on their monstrous leg strength.
I’ve never seen a competition where Shi made less than 4/6 lifts, but I think we’ve all seen Lu and Tian both bomb, and come dangerously close to bombing on numerous occasions.
But as you say, the downside to such an explosive style is that it’s harder to keep up as one ages
Thanks for the reply. this doesn’t make sense to me as soemthing that would keep Shi out though. Even though they perform power variants at an absurdly high percentage of their full lift maxes, it would seem that Shi does it on his cleans because he’s so much stronger than the other 69ers, and seems to have no trouble catching the bar in a deep squat. Further, him and the rest of the Chinese team have very strong squats and therefore leg strength – I don’t think reserve strength would be a problem for him as Daniel mentioned.
On the other hand, Luis seems to actually have some trouble catching his lifts in a deep squat (Pan Am games where he failed his last snatch, the first two were powers) so I agree with you there.
By the way, are you talking about the jerk in general or just Shi’s? It’s consensus that the jerk is actually physically easier from a strength stand point compared to a clean – the reason why it seems to be missed so much is because of technical errors and fatigue. Further, there are more dominant clean and jerkers that use the split and power style compared to the squat – and both of the former two styles call for a high elevation of the bar. It therefore seems to me that the declining knee health from the jerk shouldn’t be a factor in keeping Shi out of 2020
I think Mosquera got injured at some point, so he wasn’t able to achieve the full bottom position without discomfort.
As for Shi, I honestly find it a mystery how he was able to power c&j 183, but not do the same for just 8 kilos more, at the Asian championships this year. Plus, although Shi is a squat jerker, which as you say, does not require as much elevation of the bar as a split or power jerk would, his particular style of jerk MAY warrant injury in the future.
Compare the split jerks of Lu and Shi. Lu seems to simply drop under the bar, not actually fully extending his arms, or tightening his upper back to secure the weight until he is in the very bottom of the overhead-squat position. Therefore, Lu often has to adjust himself, and sit in that bottom position for a few seconds, before standing back up. Although, I do remember one exception to this when his flew up with 204kg like nothing at the 2013 worlds.
Shi, on the other hand, seems to lock out the arms, and create a tension in the upper back when he is about just above parallel, and rides the weight down to the bottom position a tad slower, than the first half of the descent under the bar. This results in an overall slower descent than Lu, but allows Shi to almost ‘bounce’ straight out of the squat jerk, since he doesn’t have to spend time adjusting at the bottom, like Lu does. Notable examples of this are his effortless squat jerks with 188 and 190 at Rio, where he immediately flew up as soon as he hit the bottom position.
Therefore, Shi partially rides and controls the latter part of the squat jerk to the bottom position, whereas Lu simply ‘drops’ underneath. By controlling part of the descent, one could argue that Shi puts more tension on his knees than Lu does, so I can see why Realist is concerned about Shi’s health in the future. Regardless, they’re both incredible lifters in their own right. I recommend checking out some slow motion vids of the two lifters squat jerking, since the difference in technique becomes very obvious then.
In fact, there’s a very good one by Ma Strength on Youtube, that does a side-by-side comparison, with Tian Tao as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaLPSeaXEq0
Sorry for rambling lol, I hope that makes some sort of sense 🙂
They are absolutely aware and doing what they can to extend his career but they will absolutely not change his style as that would be disastrous for him. He’s younger than Lu; when Lu was younger, he was extremely consistent. This is a Lu that is at the end of his career at age 31; that’s why he’s starting to mess up, but how does it compare to other 31 year old lifters? Tian Tao’s inconsistency is completely attributed to his odd jerk. It’s career-ruining. It’s not a squat jerk like Lu’s, or split jerk like Liao’s; it’s not even a power jerk like Apti’s! If he could do any of the 3, he’d be champion every time! It’s a weird position in which he parts his legs requiring his hips to prop up the weight perfectly at an odd angle and if not, then it all collapses.
Shi made 3/6 at 2016 Olympic trials.
I legit can’t tell whether Tian jerk is a split or a power; is it a bit of both? Part of me thinks so, since back in 2014, when he did 218kg, that was definitely a squat jerk. But now, his stance is way wider, and he doesn’t seem to sink as low as he did before. In my opinion, the jerk he’s using now is too low to be considered a traditional power jerk. I believe he’s in a sort of weird transition phase, where he’s trying to revert back to the power jerk he used to do when he was 17.
Personally, I think the squat jerk works better for Tian, since ATG’s posted a vid of him attempting a 230kg c&j. You can clearly see he sinks all the way to the bottom in a traditional squat jerk type movement. I believe this lift was pre-Rio training, so it made no sense to me when I saw him miss 210 twice, and then put up 217 at Rio with that weird ‘sumo jerk’.
I don’t even know if he’s consciously aware of this, but that fact that he tried to traditional squat jerk 230, likely a lifetime max, tells me his body is most comfortable with that style.
I don’t know why he keeps switching between these two styles of jerk, it’s probably why he’s so damn inconsistent.
Liao should do a couple of world championships before tokyo, perhaps bump up his world records in the 69 division just a bit, to remind Shi who’s boss 😉
legend comes back