Meanwhile in Russia …
After electing a new president (Maxim Agapitov) last month, today the Russian weightlifting executive committee appointed their new head coaches.
The men’s team will be lead by 1988 Olympic champion (100kg) Pavel Kuznetsov. On the women’s side we have 1976 Olympic champion (60kg) Nikolai Kolesnikov, who previously was the head coach of the junior team.
Further Reading: More about Maxim.
Update 20.03.2017: The Russian ministry of sports rejected Pavel Kuznetsov as head coach. (via)
will you cover europeans next year in Croatia??
I hope so. Depends on if I have enough moneyz to do the trip.
hookgrip and you should have free access to all weightlifting competitions and training areas for amazing content your teams provide
Perhaps, but consider it from the people who would fund Hookgrip and ATG in this situation. Either Weightlifting teams or IWF. The content HG/ATG provides doesn’t really benefit them much. IWF maybe in that it provides more media, but really that should be IWF’s job. Weightlifting teams get nothing from exposure other than more fans.
but it gave much more exposure alongside crossfit more that Iwf did in their entire history, the are like British royal family, tight assholes
What happened with David Rigert?
He was replaced by Venkov after London 2012.
Russian WL will continue to get treated differently in the next years before Tokyo with relation to the “equal offenders”. The farce of the unique Rio ban was imho only the beginning.
The overarching political pressure only targets the biggest country (and geopolitical enemy) even though the criticized system for historical reasons also exists in several states that rarely attract widespread international interest. There’s no McLaren report for say Armenia.
This targeting is infuriating because it doesn’t correctly represent the reality of WL (or athletics for that matter). That doesn’t mean that Russia isn’t guilty of their “steroid addiction”, but they will have every right to complain if they’ll be the only country forced to change due to overwhelming outside pressure.
I find it funny (in an ironic sense), that this all started because of the shitflinging between the Azeri team and the Bulgarian team over their lifters. Then Turkey and China got into it with Bulgar/Rus/Azeri and Kazakhstan/Rus/NK respectively.
Such a small argument went hot, turning a geopolitical monstrosity in Syria into a springboard which almost killed weightlifting.
You must remember that this is just a sport, but it is a sport where national pride goes hand in hand with the competition. We are at the mercy of the tide in a much larger ocean of geopolitical squalls just for having a small amount of national pride in the sport. The WADA and IOC corruption is just a symptom of this.
It happened in 1976 to keep the Bulgarians from beating their star lifters, of course the boycotts happened, it happened in 1988 to keep the Bulgarians away from the podium, and have good news to celebrate and hopefully build off of in a collapsing USSR. Also in 1988 Ben Johnson the sprinter got the geopolitical ban hammer They threw the weight categories away. Pre 1996, Kurlovich was made to not be a threat to Chemerkin because of his Belorussian flag. In 2000, bulgars got the shaft to get Tara Nott the gold medal and Ashot Danielyan was moved to give Chemerkin the Bronze during the rise of the modern Rus Fed and preying eyes off the leveling of Grozny. 2012 -105kg class comes to mind. And now there’s this.
Fire is the perfect neutral extant in nature. It keeps you warm, it burns, it cooks and creates, it destroys. Only man has weaponized it. So look at it this way. The competitors, and even ourselves, stepped into a room of tinder and accelerant. The countries have the matches. The Bulgarians and Azerbaijanis lit a match that burned more than themselves. The larger countries saw this pocket of chaos and hosed it all down with flamethrowers.
Welcome to Olympic sport. Even the ashes turn to charcoal and will burn hot again. Don’t get too into things to avoid the burn, or be prepared for more fire. My Ilya poster still hangs proud on my wall.