I was watching the phenomenal performance of the womans 59KG world record holder ,Taiwanese weightlifter Kuo Hsing-chun to win the gold medal at the Olympics this week.
Great athlete and great performance.
However I’m a little perplexed at how much better she was than the rest of the field.
When I checked the numbers she lifted 8% more than the silver medal winner which to me would seem to be an enormous performance gap at this level. She seemed to lift 103KG with relative ease whereas the best of the rest really struggled to lift 96KG.
Taiwan News puts it down to better use of technology.
The cynic in me still has some nagging questions when I look at that performance gap.
But it could be I either misunderstand the sport of weightlifting or how good this athlete really is.
What do you all think ?
World record was set by Kuo in Uzbekistan with top competitors performances FAR outshining the Olympics.
In that competition she also outperformed the pack by about 7% (so probably all else being equal she’s still the best out there )
The Chinese and Vietnamese silver and bronze from the Asian Games in Uzbekistan with performances better and equivalent to the Olympics silver and gold performances were indeed nowhere to be found in the Olympics winners table. Maybe some didn’t even enter due to very strict anti-doping measures.
It’s a fairly huge gap though not unheard of. I thought that the Turkmenistani athlete could have come in higher but she is relatively inexperienced and probably simply wanted to get a few clean lifts (and it was a good strategy).
59kg is a new category but Kuo was behind a pair of Thais in 58kg in 2016, one of whom is a notorious drug cheat and the other, if not, perhaps the only clean Thai female lifter. The winner is currently doing her second lengthy suspension and the other…I’m unsure what happened to her. She was older, I believe, and perhaps simply retired. The 55kg lifters this year are a far gap from Kuo’s division and she would have tied for the win in the 64kg.
She’s really, really, really good. I believe she could go up or down a division and be just as dominant. Toss in a few recent retirements and a few suspensions and the gap increases.
I’m unsure what “technology” they were referring to. Occasionally you will hear of gov’t institutes dropping tons of cash in some research to determine the perfect trajectory of the bar or some damn thing but then their athletes lose to some Eastern European guy lifting in a school gym.
There are exceptions to certain doping laws for particular health conditions. Like athlete has condition ABC which requires medication XYZ, just so happens the side effects mean pain suppression or it’s a stimulant or whatever.
The performance gap is often greater compared to men because there are less women who want to compete at an elite level. You’d hardly find a men’s national soccer/football team dominate the way the US and Japan have for the last decade pretty much.
That is a good point though more relevant for team sports. Having lots of young girls play sports is the best way to ensure that you figure out who is positioned to be elite if they put enough years in.
That’s a flat-out garbage article. Doing research for publication is fairly far from helping the athletes succeed in a practical manner.
she’s still the best out there )