The IOC just announced the quota changes for weightlifting in the Paris 2024 Olympic games.
IF weightlifting is included—and this is not certain— weightlifting will be reduced to:
New Quota: 120, (was 260 in Rio, will be 196 in Tokyo)
Reduction in weight classes from 7 to 5 per gender.
Kit McConnell, IOC Sports Director:
To be clear, this does not confirm the place of weightlifting in the program in Paris and the IOC executive board continues reserve the right to further review the place of weightlifting in Paris as things move forward.
The weight categories will be finalized themselves by the end of 2021, following the review of Tokyo.
They made clear that this is the biggest reduction in quotas amongst any sport (they reduced quotas for 11 sports), thanks to the mismanagement by IWF.
This is it, the Beginning of the End. Vanilla statement from our fearless leaders in IWF site,
https://www.iwf.net/2020/12/07/iwf-statement-regarding-reduction-weightlifting-quota-places-paris-2024-olympic-games/
Boxing had the 2nd largest deduction according to IOC but they added more weight divisions to women side, (7 men vs 6 women). https://www.olympic.org/news/gender-equality-and-youth-at-the-heart-of-the-paris-2024-olympic-sports-programme
Solution: Enjoy it as long as it last. After while just watch old stuff on YouTube.
TO IWF; Get off your sleep and start making sport more enjoyable to teens so in 20 years (when I am good and dead) you can have a exiting sport again.
What do you think department: Mix (male & female) division: example 70kg and 100 kg division/s. Each male and female takes two snatch and two jerks. Total of two athletes counts.
The only hope for any relief is for a mass pressure campaign by the weightlifting community to be brought to bear on IOC President Thomas Bach and the IOC EB to decertify the IWF as the international governing entity for weightlifting immediately, and appoint a conservator to manage the creation of a new constitution then operate an election based on that new constitution, otherwise there exists little or no hope for anything remotely satisfactory outcome as now unfolding, essentially a disaster in the making.
Weightlifting is almost gone at this point.
With Tokyo likely to be abandoned and the IOC emasculating W/L in 2024 if not outright cancelling it, now seems a good time to consider a radical overhaul of the sport.
Everything up for discussion.
ATG could kick off a readers’ ‘forum to see what issues are of most concern.
I assume drugs and the IWF administration would be high on the list.
Its not only W/L that is struggling. In Australiaa athletics and cycling can’t pull flies with a garbage truck parked at the gate. Both have alsi been plagued by endemic PEDs.
Maybe its time to separate the ‘naturals’ from the enhancers like the bodybuilders have done.
W/L folowers need to realize maintaining the status quo is not an option.
The Olympics don’t need weightlifting. Does weightlifting need the Olympics? The relationship has changed irrevocably over the last few decades. Wit the internet now pervasive there are limitless possibilities for change.
Without the burden of kowtowing to the IOC, weightlifting could dispense with the IWF. Boxing has many ‘world governing bodies’. Whether the sport has the resolve to embrace a new order is doubtful .Without radical change weightlifting will devolve into a cult sport.