Weight Lifting, an Original Olympic Sport, May Be Dropped (nytimes.com) 153
Weight lifting was one of just nine sports at the first Olympics in 1896, but its days on the summer program may be numbered. From a report: After decades of rampant doping, bribery, vote-rigging and corruption at weight lifting's highest levels, the International Olympic Committee finally took action last year by threatening to drop the sport from the Games in the coming months if the International Weightlifting Federation does not introduce a host of fixes, including rigorous drug testing measures and governance reforms.
The prognosis is not good. The leaders of the weight lifting federation failed during a key vote on June 30 to get the support needed to pass a new constitution aimed at addressing concerns from the Olympic committee. Delegates from the United States, Germany and China, among others, could not persuade their counterparts from the former Soviet republics, Latin America and other "old guard" weight lifting nations that would be hurt by tighter antidoping measures. If the federation, known as the I.W.F., cannot keep weight lifting on the Olympic program, millions of dollars would be cut off from a sport that lacks major television contracts or sponsors. Already, the I.O.C. had reduced the number of lifters in Tokyo to 196 from 260 during the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. The number will be cut again, to 120, at the Paris Games in 2024.
The prognosis is not good. The leaders of the weight lifting federation failed during a key vote on June 30 to get the support needed to pass a new constitution aimed at addressing concerns from the Olympic committee. Delegates from the United States, Germany and China, among others, could not persuade their counterparts from the former Soviet republics, Latin America and other "old guard" weight lifting nations that would be hurt by tighter antidoping measures. If the federation, known as the I.W.F., cannot keep weight lifting on the Olympic program, millions of dollars would be cut off from a sport that lacks major television contracts or sponsors. Already, the I.O.C. had reduced the number of lifters in Tokyo to 196 from 260 during the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. The number will be cut again, to 120, at the Paris Games in 2024.
Olympic sleeping (Score:4, Insightful)
skateboarding = a sport
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:5, Insightful)
Figure skating and gymnastics isn't a sport by any reasonable definition of sport either, seeing as they're solo performances with a "score" derived from subjective interpretation by human beings.
And yet they're *the* main attraction at the winter and summer games.
Life is easier when you realize it isn't supposed to make logical sense.
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Figure skating and gymnastics isn't a sport by any reasonable definition of sport either, seeing as they're solo performances with a "score" derived from subjective interpretation by human beings.
Don't forget Artistic (synchronized) swimming
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Figure skating and gymnastics isn't a sport by any reasonable definition of sport either, seeing as they're solo performances with a "score" derived from subjective interpretation by human beings.
Don't forget Artistic (synchronized) swimming
I'm still waiting for plesiochronous swimming.
Paleo Sports (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for plesiochronous swimming.
I thought that died out with the dinosaurs [wikipedia.org]?
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Let's have chronosynclastic swimming.
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Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:5, Interesting)
Figure skating and gymnastics isn't a sport by any reasonable definition of sport either, seeing as they're solo performances with a "score" derived from subjective interpretation by human beings.
And yet they're *the* main attraction at the winter and summer games.
Life is easier when you realize it isn't supposed to make logical sense.
Yet, other supposedly acceptable sports are significantly affected by similar levels of potentially arbitrary judgments. Basketball and football fouls and baseball strike zones are arbitrary calls by a single individual that sometimes are clearly inaccurate and can swing games and careers. American college football even has a small committee that secretly votes on who gets to participate in the playoffs, regardless of which and how many games were won. The committee gets to interpret the meaning of entire games without any challenge or appeal. We call those sports "real sports," but the reality is that arbitrary, non-appealable decisions are made for football, basketball, and baseball that have the same significance as style points for gymnastics.
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For something to be a sport and accepted into the Olympics there needs to be an established world-wide series of competitions in it, established rules and it needs to be inclusive (i.e. can't just have women's gymnastics, it's got to be men's and women's divisions).
Gymnastics scores are not all that subjective. For every move attempted there are clearly defined measurements of ability, such as the ability to strike the correct pose, to land without stumbling and so forth. Moves are ranked according to diffi
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:5, Insightful)
The score in archery and shooting is determined by the physical measureable location of where on the target your shot lands.
The only "subjective" thing about it is an argument over whether or not the hole in the paper touches the ring or not. And the paper and projectiles and measuring tools are standardized so as to minimize any such ambiguity if scoring manually.
You don't get points for style or demerits for holding your gun silly.
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:5, Funny)
You don't get points for style or demerits for holding your gun silly.
That's a big mistake IMO. You should totally get bonus points for shooting two guns while doing a sideways slide down handrails while holding a toothpick in your mouth [imgur.com]
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I'm guessing you struggle to to understand when there are penalties in hockey. Have fun seeing an icing call without interpreting something.
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:3)
Thereâ(TM)s a push for pole dancing going on right now⦠pole dancing!
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:4, Funny)
Why not? It'll fit the Faster, harder, stronger criteria
Re:Olympic sleeping (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about it being a sport.
It's that there's rampant corruption and the IOC aren't getting their fair share.
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> cost of anti-doping for weightlifting and powerlifting is staggering
If they're staggering under the load from doping, it's having the opposite effect as desired and they should stop.
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The alternative is non-testing federations. We have it in powerlifting, so why not weight lifting?
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It's not about it being a sport.
It's that there's rampant corruption and the IOC aren't getting their fair share.
And "excessive doping" -- unless you included than under corruption. From TFA:
In a phone interview, Ajan said that contrary to the allegations in the McLaren report, he had fought to eliminate the use of performance-enhancing drugs and had been attacked by national federations he penalized for excessive doping.
Which would seem to imply that they (countries and the IOC) believe there exists an acceptable level of doping ...
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Not quite. Individual athletes should not be doping. If there's too many individual athletes doping under the same national federation, it suggests that the federation has failed to police the problem.
The same way you can't fairly penalize the police for each and every crime they don't stop, but if crime is rampant, it's time for the mayor to go kick some butts at police headquarters.
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On the surface yes, but it's a lot more subtle than that.
There's some legitimate doping going on - basically performance enhancement that can be obtained somewhat naturally. Sprinters that train in Colorado, for example, have an advantage in that the thin air means their bodies will produce far more red blood cells than normal. When brought ot a more reasonable altitude, those athletes will have
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:3)
Poetry was an Olympic competition for a while.
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That explains why washed up male weightlifters are now permitted to compete as and set new records as women.
Someone that's been on steroids for years will have a distinct muscle mass advantage over someone that hasn't, even if they're forced to go into maintenance-mode for a year. Men who go through puberty have a profound muscle mass and bone density advantage over women that doesn't disappear even after a year of reducing testosterone levels.
If the IOC can't figure out how to navigate either of these issu
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Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but that doesn't account for the strength disparity. If we ignore the MTF case, consider the FTM one - a woman that starts taking testosterone later in life as part of a transition process will never get the same biological kick-in-the-pants that men have going through male puberty. They will always be at a disadvantage in things like bone density, which in strength sports is a significant factor. Is it right to say that an FTM, who everyone agrees is now a man, will never be able to compete as a man by being fundamentally unable to ever put up competitive numbers?
In powerlifting we use what's called the Wilks coefficient in order to provide a score that's indicative of relative performance that can be used for comparing performance across weight classes and (to some extent) gender. It would seem to me that one would need to come up with a similar kind of coefficient for both MTF and FTM cases and either use this as a basis for carving out their own division, or for better understanding which division to place them in to given their relative strength. Even creating just a 'trans' division wouldn't be sufficient if you wanted to ensure fairness, as the MTF cases will still have the bone density advantage that an FTM will never have. That might take time, however, as there aren't enough competitors from which to take performance data from and from which to come up with a representative model.
This does, however, require acknowledging that regardless of how somebody wants to live their life, there are still biological and physiological advantages/disadvantages that they have inherited from however they lived their life up until the point of transition, which there is presently no mechanism for normalizing. MTF cases that have undergone testosterone suppression for a year only see a drop in muscle mass of ~5%, while starting out from a strength advantage of 20-50%: https://www.theguardian.com/sp... [theguardian.com]
I have no problem with trans people competing, but it shouldn't come at the cost of MTF athletes effectively suppressing an entire gender while still failing to account for FTM cases. The IOC needs to stop playing gender politics and start looking at numbers.
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:3)
Facts : https://www.aclu.org/legal-doc... [aclu.org]
Be warned, pages of citations to reputable medical journals, actual science rather than "what everyone knows" assertions. Perhaps after spending a few hours, or days, reading through them you might re consider your views.
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Perhaps you'd like to summarise it then, because we're not spending a few hours let alone days reading through some bollocks trying to find the point you were hoping to make.
What everyone knows is that if Roger Federer pulls on a nice short skirt and a sports bra she'll win every fucking women's tennis competition she enters until she's sixty.
Re: Olympic sleeping (Score:4, Informative)
Your paper proves that you can write a lot without saying much.
First, the author conflates birth defects (intersex) with willful body modification (surgery and hormone treatments). No one is complaining about intersex people. No one. To drag them in to provide cover for what amounts to accusations of cheating is disingenuous.
Second, read all his conclusions. He uses the terms 'may' and 'no evidence' a great deal. He engages in a great deal of speculation than the people who want to ban males from competing against women, but he slathers on some science-talk, which blinds some folks. The people who he argues against have common experience on their side (men are bigger, stronger, faster than women); the author has 'may' and 'no evidence' on his side.
The only actual evidence he offers up is item 51, a small study of 8 long distance runners who have had hormone injections. That's it. That's all his evidence. Everything else is either speculation or a political position.
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I didn't believe you at first so I had to look it up and I found this amazing video of the winner of the gold medal in poetry from the 1984 olympics.
https://youtu.be/aTKZRire8Wg [youtu.be]
Re:Olympic sleeping (Score:5, Informative)
More to the point, weightlifting is not a sport with a governing body willing to do what's needed to participate in the Olympics.
The International Weightlifting Federation, headquartered in Lausanne Switzerland, consists of 192 constituent national federations. Many of those national federations are hostile to anti-doping measures because their athletes juice. The IWF is also notoriously corrupt [www.cbc.ca]. Last year when the longtime president resigned after being caught embezzling money for years, a new president came in but was quickly fired when she tried to crack down on doping.
Nobody wants weightlifting out of the Olympics. What IOC is doing by scaling back the weightlifting competition is using pain to force IWF to clean up its act. Fewer competition slots mean member federations don't get to send as many competitors, and some members might not get to send any. But ultimately, if World Skate federation can run a clean Olympic competition and IWF can't, then skateboarding gets to be an Olympic sport and weightlifting misses out. It's not a judgment on the value of the sports themselves.
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weight lifting = not a sport .... got it, dude.
skateboarding = a sport
Hey both are sports. They are displays of human strength and dexterity. Now Olympic pony prancing on the other hand... who is doing the sport again? Maybe if the horses wanted to challenge each other they should stay out of human events.
Either that or I propose a new sport: olympic cat herding.
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weight lifting = not a sport...skateboarding = a sport
I always thought it's not a sport if you can smoke or drink beer while doing it. Then it's a pastime.
So, darts - definitely not a sport. Cricket - a sport at higher levels than I play :-)
.
It has been a competition of chemists for decades (Score:5, Insightful)
Terminate with extreme prejudice all classic weightlifting? Excellent idea. Gets my vote
If any lifting is to remain at the Olympics, that should be powerlifting or something similar which does not leave sportsmen cripples once the sport is done with them.
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Powerlfiting is squatting, deadlifting, and bench press. You combine the total. They have meets and leagues and so forth, but it's not a part of the Olympics.
Olympic lifting is clean & jerking and snatcihng. It's not as popular of a sport, they don't really have leagues for it, but it is a part of the Olympics.
Re:It has been a competition of chemists for decad (Score:4, Insightful)
Weightlifting is basically picking up weights and putting them above your head that sane people use a forklift for.
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Jealous of what? Being too stupid to drive a forklift?
Re:It has been a competition of chemists for decad (Score:5, Insightful)
Olympic lifting is less damaging to the body than powerlifting. It's more about form, speed, and flexibility, champion lifters are putting up 550 pounds as opposed to 1150 pounds squatting. Plus powerlifiting is even more boring to watch than Olympic lifting.
Yes, doping is rampant, but that's probably true for half the Olympic sports. Older Tour de France results (for example) will have 7-9 of the top 10 finishers retroactively caught doping, and knowing how to 'roid to avoid doping tests is just a part of the sport.
To my mind, despite all the problems with the sport...lifting heavy weights is a basic test of athleticism, like running fast, and deserves a permanent place in the games.
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You speak of 2x body weight, but 2x body weight won't even qualify you to enter some events.
When you get to the point where bones might break under the strain and tendons might burst, you've gone beyond healthy.
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Nobody really wants weight lifting removed from the Olympics, but they do want contests to see who can inject the most weird things in their butt cheeks out. If the current weightlifting federations are unwilling or unable to make that happen, they too must go. They can hold their own event if they want or offer their posteriors as targets for darts competitions.
Ideally a clean organization will form so the clean athletes can continue free from the cheats.
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This not a sport any more. Doped to the hilt
Yes that sure does differentiate it from other sports that are staying in.
There are people who spend thousands on doping programs so they can win virtual bragging rights on Strava. The idea that there are any top level sports out there where doping isn't rampant is silly.
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Re:It has been a competition of chemists for decad (Score:5, Interesting)
For anyone curious about how doping at professional levels works and how they're able to get away without being detected, there's a 2017 Oscar-winning documentary called Icarus that dives deep on the subject (available on Netflix [netflix.com] around the world, so far as I can tell). While the story starts out as a straightforward enough "let me blow the whistle on X by doing X" narrative, with the filmmaker hoping to expose how easy doping is by engaging in it himself (he's a high-level, amateur cyclist), by the end of the film people are going into witness protection and a country is getting banned from the Olympics.
I don't bother with many documentaries and I don't care about sports, but this one is definitely worth a watch. It's a wild ride.
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You really must inform the medical community of your discovery that vertebrae are made of cartilage.
Because they all seem to have it wrong.
"The adult spine is made up of approximately 24 bones (vertebrae) stacked on top of each other from the bottom of the skull to the pelvis."
"Your spine is made up of 24 small bones (vertebrae) that are stacked on top of each other to create the spinal column. Between each vertebra is a soft, gel-like cushion called a disc that helps absorb pressure and keeps the bones fro
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Hyaline cartilage is the most widespread type and resembles glass. In the embryo, bone begins as hyaline cartilage and later ossifies.
Fibrous cartilage has many collagen fibers and is found in the intervertebral discs and pubic symphysis.
Elastic cartilage is springy, yellow, and elastic and is found in the internal support of the external ear and in the epiglottis.
Time to inform your licensi
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You don't use your asshole to lift weights. That picture circulating the internet five years ago was fake.
Re:It has been a competition of chemists for decad (Score:5, Funny)
This is a joke right? (Score:3)
ROFLMAO!
Re:This is a joke right? (Score:4, Insightful)
The IOC is worried about corruption?
They're worried that they're not getting a cut.
So that's how they do it (Score:3, Interesting)
Was wondering how they would deal with eventually the entire field of women's weight-lifters being all men... solution: just drop it al!
I still maintain that there should be some Olympic events, maybe even a whole entire alternative to the Olympics, that embraces chemistry / cyborgs and let competitors use whatever means they can in order to compete in an event like weightlifting. Replace bones with metal alloys and jack up the muscles with pure chemistry? Go for it. Trans-humanism could be really interesting if not held back, and then you have no controversy around genders or anything else, because you move beyond that.
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Jeez there's always some asshole who drags identity politics into everything.
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It's been done: All Drug Olympics [youtube.com]
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Selective Breeding (Score:2)
How about using selective breeding to produce top athletes? It already happens to a large degree, you will find that most of the top athletes have a parent that was an athlete of some note. And athletes tend to marry other athletes, as they know each other and have common interests and outlooks.
Take that a bit further, can we start fiddling with genes directly? Is that OK? Should you be banned because your grandparent was fiddled with? And what exactly is the fiddling, e.g. suppose embryos could be tes
Totally not news for nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that nerds are either rail-thin 98 pound weaklings or 347 pounds monstrosities, with absolutely no normal or physically fit people to be found in their ranks.
And they're all allergic to the concept of "sportsball" too.
Or so I'm told.
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Weightlifting, as the article points out, involves plenty of "doping," which is being pushed to its maximum capacities by chemistry nerds around the world. So, that's at least one connection.
I will agree that nerds, in general, tend to care more about things that actually matter (like, you know, advancing technologies that actually change the world). Even so, there are plenty of nerds who still get drawn in to all the obsession over maxing-out what human bodies can do naturally.
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I've certainly pushed doping to the maximum when I was younger
Powerlifting Instead? (Score:2)
I respect the discipline of Olympic lifting, but the problem is that "Olympic" lifting has been divorced from the type of weight lifting most people actually do in a gym these days. Olympic movements are simply too complex and too dangerous for the average gym goer.
Power lifting makes a lot more sense because the movements are comparatively simple and practiced by many gym goers worldwide.
Doping will always be an issue in any sport that is heavily dependent on raw strength or endurance. I'm not sure it's po
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I have heard people talk about the future of many sports should not be segmented based on bodyweights or even gender lines but on measurements of certain hormones at the time of competition to even things out among the different classes of competitors as these are a better indicator of natural abilities.
It's an interesting to think about since in something like weightlifting even if you could guarantee a zero doping (whatever that means) a person with certain androgen/testosterone levels will just be able t
Problem is legacy physiology (Score:2)
I have heard people talk about the future of many sports should not be segmented based on bodyweights or even gender lines but on measurements of certain hormones at the time of competition to even things out among the different classes of competitors as these are a better indicator of natural abilities.
The problem is that a legacy physiology may persist in an individual. An individual may be hormonally clean at the time of competition yet still benefit from a legacy male upper body muscular structure that developed prior to transition. This physiology may make no difference when it comes to which bathroom should be used, which pronoun should be used, but in some physical activities it will make a difference and needs to somehow be accounted for with respect to competition.
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I saw a transcript of some interesting expert testimony on the subject. Going through a male puberty and then transitioning can even be a drawback for later competition. The athlete winds up with bones the size and weight typical of a male without the muscles to compensate.
The IOC's team of doctors decided that (I may be wrong, working from memory) a couple of years off testosterone was enough for even competition.
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The solution is to just eat spinach. All natural and more effective for muscle growth than steroids. Beets are right up there, too.
All Drug Olypics (Score:2)
If any sport would trigger it, Weightlifting will...
Finally, it's time has come, the All Drug Olympics!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Yo Grark
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Not corrupt enough? (Score:3)
"If the federation, known as the I.W.F., cannot keep weight lifting on the Olympic program, millions of dollars would be cut off from a sport that lacks major television contracts or sponsors."
So - it's not so much the scandals of the moment, so much that there's no easy predictable form of bribery and commercial interest involved in it.
Covid times are fascinating in a way, aren't they? How the stretched resources in so many ways show us how priorities pan out on a lot of places. Like - how life and death aren't that important to lots and lots of organizations, and traditions will be thrown away along with many lives if only their preferred form of corruption can stand uninterrupted.
Ryan Fenton
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How about dropping spear-throwing? (Score:2)
Never saw anybody with a spear, not even to hunt.
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Never saw anybody with a spear, not even to hunt.
1st world problem.
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Never saw anybody with a spear, not even to hunt.
Here you go, with the added bonus of lots and lots of running [youtube.com]. You're welcome.
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You need that spear to defend yourself against the guys throwing really heavy balls and weighted frisbees at you.
2 nmol/L of testosterone (Score:3)
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Split (Score:2)
Why not split the sport into doped and clean? Do the drug tests on the clean group and if they test positive, send them to the doped team. That gives the folks who choose a more natural approach the ability to win since they won't be competing against a bunch of juicers.
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There's always the circus... (Score:2)
sure (Score:4, Insightful)
On the one hand, Olympic Committee DEMANDS intensive drug testing in the interest of fairness.
On the other, Olympic Committee allows a man to say "I'm a chick!" and compete as a woman. (Sorry actual chicks that have spent their WHOLE LIVES training for this competition!)
Sure, that's rock solid consistency there.
And if you're one of those people that thing the playing field is physically equal between males and females?
https://boysvswomen.com/#/ [boysvswomen.com]
(Hint: if you spend 99% of your life as a boy, and then for the most recent 1% start wearing a dress, those advantages don't just disappear.)
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Not sure how trans athletes came up (Score:2, Interesting)
But since it's a topic, here's what a doctor with relevant experience had to say, including giving citations.
https://www.aclu.org/legal-doc... [aclu.org]
It's pretty interesting. That was the source for my post earlier about winding up worse off athletically by having female-typical muscles trying to move large heavy bones left over from a testosterone-fueled puberty.
There is a lot of interesting science about trans and intersex people. Extensive opportunities to nerd out.
Well, not really (Score:2)
Weight lifting was one of just nine sports at the first Olympics in 1896
The first Olympics were held in 776 BC, and consisted of a single event -- the stadion, a 200-yard foot race. That was the only event for the first 13 Olympic Festivals. Weightlifting was never an event in the ancient Olympics.
Delhi 2076 - The Last Olympics (Score:3)
With the coming revolution in undetectable genetic engineering, the Olympics will become meaningless. A few strategic "mutations" can create a super athlete. And yes, it can be done in all cells, or in the germline. It can't be detected like chemical doping tests, there is no genetic modification signature to detect. There would be no way to tell whether someone got lucky and was born with the mutations that do things like provide fast-twitch muscles, long torso, large feet, long wingspan, joint flexibility, ultra-fast reflexes. There's a whole bunch of genes, already known, that provide these things. A subset of them can be chosen to enable a super athlete (Michael Phelps was born naturally with many of those). There would be no way to know if someone wasn't G-modded either at the embryo stage or even after birth (yes, it is possible to do genetic engineering such that all your cells are modified even as an adult.)
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Well, we could always do it like race horsing - handicaps!
When I found out about handicaps, I was mystified! The better the horse, the more weight it has to carry to give the other horses a chance! I mean, to me it seems that whether a horse wins or loses is just a result of how well its competence was judged by whatever system decides the handicap. But apart from my own disbelief, it seems to work fine for people into horse races, so perhaps, we could do it for the Olympics!
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oh no (Score:2)
watch those toes!
Anti-doping (Score:2)
Can't the competitors be tested for drugs for the Olympics, by the Olympics? Must be something I missed here.
Re: Anti-doping (Score:2)
I think the issue is the process that weeds out the competitors to select the Olympic athletes, the Olympics have been drug testing athletes for years.
There's some irony. (Score:2)
The only thing I care about at this Olympics is the shabby way that some people are treating Simone Biles, who experienced the "twisties", a real problem, sort of similar to the "yips".
It happens, and while the yips aren't usually deadly, "twisties" can kill a gymnast
I haven't seen the obligatory xkcd yet (Score:2)
https://xkcd.com/1173/ [xkcd.com]
It is insightful, but misses the point about health risks.
Blockchain (Score:2)
I eagerly await (Score:2)
I eagerly await the elimination of Mens and Women's sports categories - I question the need to separate the two, since women athletes bristle at perceived slights of women's sports?
Splash are valid data (Score:2)
In some sports you lose because the judges didn't like how the water you jumped into splashed.
FWIW, the splash is an indication of how streamlined you were upon entry. Its valid data with respect to execution of technique.
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Not only that, but body shape and weight are going to matter a ton. Even with a perfectly vertical dive, a 100 lb stick thin pencil shaped fella ain't going to produce the same degree of splash as a 200 lb bulky individual with a bigger cross sectional area. Never liked the splash factor in the scoring.