The Crucible

When people hear that we are about to attend our 11^th Olympics, most people are probably asking themselves, “Why??".  In this blog I will explain what keeps bringing me back.

I started out, like many Americans, watching Jim McKay and the Olympics on ABC. And while I was as happy as anyone when the US won a medal, I really liked the feature stories by people like Jack Perkins. These stories would follow not only American athletes, but athletes from all over the world. They typically showed the athletes, their hometowns, coaches, friends and their training months before the Olympics. These stories clearly showed that brilliant athletic ability was not enough. Huge effort, and often personal sacrifice, was required to become the best. I did not think much about it, but I’d often find myself rooting for the people featured in these stories. One of my favorites was the story of Tanzanian marathon runner John Stephen Akhwari, who ran more than 20km at the 1968 Summer Olympics with a dislocated knee. When asked why, he responded “My country did not send me 10,000 miles to start the race; they sent me to finish the race.”

Many years passed. Beth and I attended Winter Olympics in Lake Placid (1980), Calgary (1988) and Lillehammer (1994), but I could not have told you during that time what it was that drew me to the Olympics. That changed on a humid morning in Atlanta in 1996 when my wife and I found ourselves outside the Georgia World Congress Center. This was the venue for Fencing, Handball, Judo, Modern Pentathlon, Table Tennis, Weightlifting and Wrestling. Someone had two tickets for Heavyweight Weightlifting that they were trying to sell. I had grown up watching Vasily Alekseyev of the Soviet Union win gold medals and we had nothing else to do at the time, so we took the tickets.

Unlike all of our other events, there was no line to get in. In fact, there were very few spectators present. There were only a couple broadcast crews and no one was sitting in the special “Olympic Family” seats that are reserved for athletes, sponsors and Olympic committee members. A quick look at the tickets told us the reason – this was the Classification event. The top 10 lifters based on pre-Olympic performances would be competing later in the afternoon. They were expected to be the ones competing for the medals. The remaining lifters still compete for medals, but were thought less likely to win.

Weightlifting is actually two events in one. First is the Snatch where a lifter has to bring the weight all the way over his head in a single motion. The second part is the Clean and Jerk where the lifter brings the weight first to shoulder level and then brings it over their head. Each lifter gets three chances in the Snatch and if at least one is successful, then gets three more in Clean and Jerk. The final order is decided by total weight lifted and if there is a tie, the lighter man wins.

After the first lift in the Snatch, last place was held by a 29 year old from Bungo, Uganda named Ali Kavuma.  This was the 2^nd Olympics for Ali. He previously finished 24^th in the Middleweight division in Seoul in 1988. Even though his first lift of 105 kg (231 lbs for the metrically challenged) was nearly equal to his body weight of 106.95 kg (235.8 lbs), he found himself more than 50 kg (110 lbs) behind the best lifters in this session and 75 kg (165 lbs) behind eventual gold medalist Tymur Taimazov from Ukraine. Undeterred, Ali followed that with another successful Snatch of 110 kg (243 lbs) and then failed on his last lift at 115 kg (254 lbs).

Despite successful Clean and Jerks of 140 kg (309 lbs) and 145 kg (320 lbs), he was still in 19^th and last place at 255 kg (562 lbs) when he came on stage for his final lift. The weight was set at 150 kg (331 lbs) – a weight that he had never lifted in competition. He wobbled on the way up and I was sure that he was going to drop the bar, but he somehow got the weight to his shoulders. It was probably only a second or two, but it seemed like he waited a long time before starting the Jerk. He got the weight up and locked one elbow and very slowly locked the other elbow. He took a few steps as he lost control of the weight and I was holding my breath to see whether he could keep the weight up long enough for it to be considered a good lift. Then the white light from the judges came on and he dropped the weight – and stood there. For a second, there was no reaction. Then the public address announced that Ali’s combined total of 260 kg (573 lbs) had set a personal best…and a national best….and a continental best! I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. Then this big guy got a huge smile on his face, did a standing back flip on the stage and the audience just went nuts. And then I knew. The reason that I attend the Olympics is that it is a crucible. Add enough talented people, apply enough pressure and if you are really lucky, you may see someone produce a performance that they did not believe they were capable of and that changes their life forever.