Your Guide to 2024 Olympic Women’s Weightlifting
The Olympics aren't over yet! In this edition: Meet weightlifters from Team USA, get lifting tips from top contender Olivia Reeves, find out how to watch the weightlifting competitions, and more.
This summer, for only the seventh time in Olympic history, women will grace the lifting platform in their nation’s colors. It wasn’t until 2000 that women were allowed to compete in weightlifting at the Olympics, but the competition is fierce. For the United States, our women’s team is historically a stronger group of contenders than our men’s team. This year, only two American men qualified to go to Paris, while the women’s field was full of potential competitors vying for just three slots.
Only one athlete on the women’s team, Jourdan Delacruz, is a returning Olympian. Last time, in Tokyo, she made the third-best snatch in her weight class, but failed every clean and jerk attempt, which disqualified her from the competition. The other two athletes are Olivia Reeves and Mary Theisen-Lappen, mid- and heavyweight athletes who are ranked first and fifth in their weight classes going into the competition. Olivia is expected to medal (no pressure), while Mary has flown under the radar in her division, coming seemingly out of nowhere in her international debut at the Pan American Weightlifting Championships in 2021.
In this edition, Mary shares her story and Olivia dishes out tips that have helped her dial in technique on the olympic lifts. You can watch them and other women from around the world compete via NBC — scroll for the schedule.
~Meredith Sell
P.S. Publishing this a day earlier than usual because the first weightlifting competitions are on Wednesday and I know the planners among us would like at least a little forewarning. Enjoy!
A Quick Note on Olympic Weightlifting
Olympic weightlifting is a sport involving two lifts, aka the olympic lifts: the clean and jerk, and the snatch. Olympic weightlifting competitions are the type of lifting competition that happens at the Olympics, but not all olympic weightlifting competitions are associated with the actual Olympics. Organizations like USA Weightlifting put on olympic weightlifting competitions, but their competitions are not part of the Olympics.
Throwing Weight
When former shot putter Mary Theisen-Lappen started weightlifting, she wasn’t thinking about the Olympics. But success in the sport reawakened her competitive drive.
When she thinks of the way she lifted in college, Mary Theisen-Lappen cringes. Every day of the week at Winona State University, Mary lifted as part of her training for shot put and discus. Her team squatted and benched, building strength and explosivity. When they set up for barbell cleans, they wrapped lifting straps around their wrists and the barbell.
“I’m so glad I never broke my wrist,” says Mary, who is competing on Team USA this summer as an olympic weightlifter.
Mary is 33 now, older than many Olympians, and stronger than she was in her early 20s. She’s in Paris for her first-ever Olympics, fulfilling a long-held dream of competing under the Olympic torch. The lifelong athlete grew up playing soccer, basketball, volleyball, and softball. Basketball was her favorite high school sport, but she couldn’t see herself playing at the college level, so she focused instead on track, competing as a thrower.
She started at Winona State in Minnesota and after her sophomore year transferred to Indiana University to see how she measured up to Division One throwers. She did well, posting the third best shot put throw in IU history her first season there. In 2014, she was named an All-American and earned two all-conference honors in shot put and weight throw. Her strength backed up her performance. She didn’t have great lifting technique, but she was often the strongest in the weight room.
After college, she briefly tried powerlifting, a sport her dad and sister both compete in. She did two powerlifting meets with her family, including one with all three of her younger sisters and their dad, but the training felt too much like training for track and field. It wasn’t interesting to her on its own, and the real fun part — throwing — was noticeably absent.
“I felt like a track and field athlete that got the throwing taken away from me,” Mary says, so she quit powerlifting.
From 2015 to 2017, she worked as a track and field coach and didn’t lift at all. “Even though I’m a coach and I know what to tell people to do in a gym, personally I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ so I just didn’t,” she says.
Late 2017, a friend from track was being recruited by USA Weightlifting to compete. He referred Mary to the recruiting coach. At first, she wasn’t interested. She was content with her life and didn’t feel a need to try anything new, but she remembered that she loved competing. Maybe she could just try and see how it went.
She reached out to the coach and started learning both olympic lifts.
“How am I ever going to grip a heavy bar if I don’t have straps?” she asked the friend who was coaching her. She couldn’t imagine having the grip strength needed to clean or snatch hundreds of pounds.
But it didn’t take her long to learn the hook grip, and she soon found that pulling the weight from the floor instead of the hanging position came naturally, at least for the clean. The snatch was harder.
“The snatch is more like the hammer or the discus [in track],” Mary says. “You have to be more graceful; you have to be more patient. Whereas the clean and jerk is like the shot put, where you can just go crazy and you can have a little bit more room for error. That’s probably why I like the clean and jerk better.”
The technical challenge of the olympic lifts instantly made the sport more appealing to her than powerlifting. The learning curve was steep and humbling. Though her natural strength offered one advantage, Mary realized that her ability to master each movement would determine whether she could move more weight than her peers or even women in lighter weight classes. She competed for the first time in January 2018, and she was hooked.
“I wish I would have known about weightlifting earlier, because I would have done it right after college and not taken time off,” Mary says. “I feel like I finally found what my body was supposed to do.”
When COVID hit in 2020, Mary was starting to feel more proficient in both lifts. Competitions were on hold so she couldn’t see how she compared to other athletes, but she kept training in the garage of her home in Omro, Wisconsin. When she was furloughed from work, she spent more time drilling the movements and building up strength.
At her first international meet in fall 2021, the Pan American Weightlifting Championships in Ecuador, she took her competitors by surprise and moved a total of 270 kg (595 lbs; 117 kg/258 lbs snatch and 153 kg/337 lbs clean and jerk). She won.
“I had been waiting and waiting and waiting for the opportunity to compete,” she says, and she wasn’t disappointed.
That competition and the success she saw from training as a full-time athlete gave her the notion that maybe she could go to the Paris Olympics. She started transitioning from coaching track to coaching weightlifting online, and in June 2022, she and her husband sold their home in Wisconsin. That August, they moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to be closer to her weightlifting coach, and she started training full-time.
For weightlifting, Olympic qualifiers happen all over the world for more than a year before the Olympic Games. Weightlifters have to participate in at least five of seven meets, and must be in the top ten in their weight class in the world while also being the top-ranked lifter in their weight class in their country. Each country only sends three women and three men to the Olympics, and only one athlete per weight class. Women from the United States have some of the toughest competition.
“Half of the battle for us was beating out the people in our own weight class, which most countries in the world didn’t have to do,” Mary says.
Mary missed the first Olympic qualifier in Colombia due to an injury. The first qualifier she competed in was April 2023 in Argentina; the last (her sixth) was a year later in Thailand. Typically, weightlifters only compete about two times a year, making six competitions a massive challenge. Mary didn’t seal her spot on the Olympic team until the last qualifier. She was so exhausted by then that making the team was a relief. “Everyone was like, ‘You need to celebrate, you need to celebrate,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I need to go sleep,’” she says.
Because most of the weightlifters participate in most of the Olympic qualifiers, Mary won’t be competing against strangers in Paris. They’ve all lifted on the same platforms, clung to the same bar, and sweated under the same lights.
For Mary, the Olympics feel like a huge reward for all the work she put into qualifying. “I’m trying to just soak it all in,” Mary says. “This was the plan. We did it. We made it. I just want to have a good time and compete the best that I can.”
Olympic Weightlifting Tips from Olivia Reeves
The 21-year-old from Chattanooga is another first-time Olympian — and a top-ranked athlete in the 71 kg weight class.
Olivia Reeves has been moving a barbell since fourth grade. The 21-year-old sociology major practically grew up in her parents’ CrossFit gym, and at age 12, started training in olympic weightlifting with her coach Steve Fauer. “In my mind, it was to get better at CrossFit, and then I realized you can compete in this,” she says.
She’s been competing ever since, winning second place in her first international youth competition in 2019, and building one accomplishment on another with every appearance.
“I never go into a competition expecting to medal,” she says. “I expect to make my lifts.”
At the final Olympic qualifier in April, the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) World Cup in Thailand, she won the gold and broke three American records with her 118 kg (260 lbs) snatch and 150 kg (330 lbs) clean and jerk.
Lifting nerds have highlighted Olivia’s performance for technical proficiency and efficiency, pointing to adjustments she makes in fractions of a second that keep the bar in its proper path while maintaining her balance and control over the weight. Here she shares a few tips for athletes and coaches that have helped her stand the weight up over and over again.
1. Pay attention to how a good lift feels — and replicate that feeling.
You, the athlete, know when your balance is centered or slightly off, when the weight is pulling you forward or back, when one part of the movement is smooth as butter. Any lifting cues that are helpful to you in mastering the lift will simply put that right feeling into words.
“Whether that cue is keep the heels down, stay over the bar, flat feet, or you’re trying to make a sound — there are so many different ways to say the same thing,” Olivia says. “It’s however you think about the lift and however it connects with the feeling you’re trying to replicate of getting a solid lift and not taking a step forward, leaning back, whatever. … What I’m looking for is a feeling.”
2. The lift you just executed will tell you if you did the lift right.
Did you stand the lift right up? Did you rock back on your heels? “The feedback of how the lift goes is how I know that I did something right,” Olivia says.
This goes hand-in-hand with the feeling mentioned above. Once you know how a good lift feels, you can notice the feedback from other lifts to understand what in your technique needs to be tightened up.
3. You are in control of the bar.
“It took me years to realize that once the bar leaves the floor, I have control over what’s going to happen,” Olivia says. “Before, it was just, I lift and I lift and I’m not actively trying to change something in the lift.”
But the lifter is the activating force, which makes the barbell the object of that force.
“You have control over your body and the bar, and there are split seconds that you need to make changes to the lift in order to make it [or] save it,” she says. Intentionally taking control over the bar can eliminate some of the fear people have in executing the olympic lifts, while also helping them move the bar with more power.
Tip for coaches: Stop overloading athletes with lifting cues.
Three cues is too many for an athlete to implement. “The lift is happening so fast,” Olivia says. “You can’t think about the heels and the bar coming back and then standing all the way up.”
Overthinking slows athletes down, and a slow lift is a missed lift.
Instead, limit yourself to one new cue per session. And before you choose that cue, let your athlete do about 10 reps so you can identify the biggest issue in their lift and tailor your cue to that. Don’t nitpick every little thing. If your athletes have the overall technique down, focusing on recreating the feeling of the good lift will help them home in on the little things they need to do to perfect their technique.
How to Watch
Both women’s and men’s weightlifting competitions are taking place on August 7 through August 11, starting with men’s 61 kg and women’s 49 kg weight classes. You can watch on CNBC and USA Network television channels or stream on Peacock and NBC Olympics platforms or the NBC or NBC Olympics apps.
Schedule (Eastern Time)
Wednesday, August 7, 1:30–4 p.m. - Women’s 49 kg/108 lbs (Jourdan Delacruz)
Thursday, August 8, 9–11:30 a.m. - Women’s 59 kg/130 lbs
Friday, August 9, 1:30–4 p.m. - Women’s 71 kg/156 lbs (Olivia Reeves)
Saturday, August 10, 10 a.m.–12:30 p.m. - Women’s 81 kg/178 lbs
Sunday, August 11, 5:30–8 a.m. - Women’s 81+ kg/178+ lbs (Mary Theisen-Lappen)
Subject to change. For up-to-date times, check the NBC Olympics website.
How to Win a Weightlifting Competition
Seems simple enough: just lift the highest total amount of weight. But Olympic weightlifting can get kind of technical on what counts and what doesn’t. Each lift — whether the snatch or the clean and jerk — involves getting the bar from the floor to overhead and standing all the way up. But you can’t just raise the weight and drop it right away. At the top of the lift, you have to hold the weight steady overhead until two of the three referees give the okay to lower. Lower the weight too soon and the lift is a miss.
Unlike other Olympic competitions, weightlifting events only involve a final, no previous rounds of competition. Each final has a snatch portion and a clean and jerk portion, and each athlete gets three attempts per lift to move the most weight they can.
Athletes choose what weights they will attempt when they weigh in two hours before the competition starts. The athlete with the lowest starting weights goes first, and weight is gradually added to the bar. Athletes lift in the order of their requested weight until they have each made three attempts. If an athlete fails all three attempts in either the snatch or the clean and jerk, they are disqualified from the competition.
To determine the winner, the weight of each athlete’s best lift in both portions is added together. The athlete with the highest total weight wins.
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