World Championship and Olympic Weightlifting - 1998-2014

From 1998 through this past November, there have been four Olympic weightlifting competitions and 13 World Weightlifting Championship competitions.  Over that time frame, 1,684 men from 126 countries have attempted to hoist at much weight as possible over their heads.  I recently compiled this data set and decided to take it out for a spin and see what it could tell me.

                I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with this data set but the one thing that I was very interested in was the relative level of competition amongst the weight classes and also amongst the individual meets.  For instance, at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, Iranian Hossein Reza Zadeh broke the world record for the superheavyweight division with a total of 472.5 kg.  While one might expect the margin of victory to be large given that he broke the world record for the total, it was actually the second most competitive meet amongst the superheavies.

                The top five finishers that year completed five of the top 14 totals lifted in the past seventeen years.  For some perspective, there have been 451 individual lifters in the 105+ weight class so in one meet the top five lifters were in the top 3%.  The fifth place finisher (Korean Tae-Hyun Kim) lifted 460 kg, a total that would have won him the London Olympics in 2012 and seven different world championships.

HOW WOULD ONE MEASURE COMPETITIVENESS?

                Ah, a fantastic question.  The easiest way to measure this would be a simple margin of victory between the winner and the second place finisher.  However, this could give some false positives if there are two very good lifters in one class that are head and shoulders above the rest of the field.  The easy answer is to expand the field from two lifters to five so that’s exactly what I did.  I looked at the winner’s margin over the second, third, fourth, and fifth place finishers and added it together.  In the 2000 Olympics in the 105+ weight class, that would look like this:

                (472.5 – 467.5) + (472.5 – 462.5) + (472.5 – 460) + (472.5 – 460) = 40

                However, there is another problem with that.  Weights lifted are not created equal.  It’s far more impressive for Halil Mutlu to win by 20 kg in the 56 kg class than it is for Reza Zadeh to win by 20 kg in the 105+ weight class.  Then, my way forward was clear; I’d simply normalize the sum of the margins above by dividing it by the winning weight.  For Reza Zadeh in the Sydney Olympics, his score would be:

                40 / 472.5 = 0.085

                One way to think about this number is Reza Zadeh bested the next four competitors by a combined 8.5%.  Definitely not a perfect metric but when we’re looking at how competitive weight classes are, it’s a good start.

HOW COMPETITIVE ARE THE WEIGHT CLASSES OVERALL?

                Before looking at individual meets, I decided to look at the weight classes as a whole.  To calculate these values, I took the average of all of the first through fifth place finishers in each class at each meet over the past seventeen years and then subjected them to the analysis that I listed above.

                This is what those results look like.  The first five columns are the average results of lifters who finished in those positions and the next four columns are how far behind the winner they finished.  They, second from the right is the sum of these margins and the last column is their normalized score and in this case, the smaller that score, the more competitive the weight class has been.

                From this look, there is a fairly large divide between two groups of weight classes.  The 56, 62, 69, and 105+ kg classes have relatively large spreads, especially compared to the 77, 85, 94, and 105 kg classes.

                What are some possible reasons for this disparity?  I have a theory, and it comes to the average size of an adult male…

STATISTICAL TRAIN OF LOGIC

                Let us assume that one out of every ten million adult men is a world class Olympic weightlifter.  Let us also assume that the weights of men follow a true bell curve with an average weight of 90 kg and a standard deviation of 10 kg.

                By this logic, 68.26% of the population (or 1.365 billion men) are between 80 and 100 kg in body weight.  Given the assumptions made previously, there are 136 world class weightlifters in that weight range and there are only two weight classes (three if you include the 105 kg class).  Meanwhile, the 56 kg class is so far from the mean that in our crude model, there are only 0.13% of men that weigh less than 50 kg and 2.27% that weigh less than 60 kg.  Those percentages translate to 0.26 and 4.28 world class lifters below those weights.

                My theory is that as you get closer and closer to average in terms of stature (height and weight to start with) then the more competitive the meets become because there is a larger pool from which to draw the athletes.  The first look at the numbers bears this out.

THE SUPER-HEAVIES

                The one class that seems to be a bit incongruous with the others is the 105+ kg class.  It seems that, according to the logic introduced a short time ago, the superheavyweight class is not far enough from the mean (231 pounds) to be that much of an outlier.  However, the average weight of the 202 men that have competed in the 105+ category – which includes each of the 451 individual entries; each of the five times Andrei Chemerkin competed goes into this average – is 134.9 kg (298 pounds).  This is much more of an outlier than the lower limit for the weight class.  It’s the one class where weight doesn’t really matter.  I understand that body weight breaks ties (lower body weight wins ties) but there is no upper limit that the lifters have to be cognizant of; they can weigh as much as they want.

INDIVIDUAL MEETS

                Given all that I’ve talked about thus far, it should surprise nobody that of the 10 most competitive individual meets, 9 of them came from the 77 kg (1), 85 kg (4), 94 kg (3), and 105 kg (1) weight classes.  It also should be no surprise that 9 of the 10 least competitive meets occurred in the 56 kg (3), 62 kg (2), 69 kg (2), and 105+ kg (2) category.

                The most prominent name on this list is that of Turkish lifter Halil Mutlu, who has been one of the best weightlifters of the past two decades (more on that later).  His three meets that appear in the top ten for least competitive were won by an average of 19.2 kg over second place.  In fact, Mutlu’s six World Championship or Olympic appearance in this data set were won by an average of 13.3 kg.  By contrast, Ilya Ilyin (another of the best lifters of the past two decades) won his six titles by an average of 2.2 kg and three of those six were ties that were broken by body weight.

                There’s a reason by Ilyin’s name appears three times on the list of most competitive meets.  He has won world championships in three different weight classes but they are the central three classes; 85 kg, 94 kg, and most recently, 105 kg.

                The other noteworthy bit that you can see in this table is there have been multiple three-way ties for first place (there have been a total of 3 three-way ties).  There have been 14 other instances of a two-way tie for first place over the years.  On average, one of the 8 weight classes will have a championship decided by body weight every year.

WHO IS THE BEST OF THE BEST?

                There have been 12 different lifters that have won at least three championships between 1998 and 2014.  Before going any further, it is worth mentioning that many of the best lifters in history did their work long before this time period (such as Russian Vasily Alexeyev) or they began their careers before this time period and continued their run after 1998 (such as Turk Halil Mutlu or Greek Pyrros Dimas).  However, all I can do is look at the sample set that’s put in front of me.

                Despite those difficulties, this question isn’t actually as difficult as I may have portrayed.  Of the aforementioned 12 men who have won three championships, there are three that have won double that and amongst those three, it’s not hard to extrapolate to who will end up being the best.

                Halil Mutlu won four world championships and two Olympic gold medals between 1998 and 2004.  In addition to these medals, he won both the snatch and the clean & jerk gold medals at all four world championships (at the world championships, three medals are awarded for snatch, clean & jerk, and total… at the Olympics, only a single medal is awarded for the highest total) for a total of 14 gold medals at the international level.

                Iranian Hossein Reza Zadeh started his career slightly later than Mutlu which means that he has more in our sample set.  Reza Zadeh took the bronze at the 1999 world championships and then the gold medal at the 2000 Olympics.  After not competing in 2001, he won five straight titles (four world championships and another Olympic gold medal) from 2002 to 2006.

                Kazak Ilya Ilyin won his first world championship in the 85 kg class at the age of 17.  He then won two world championships (2006 and 2011) and two Olympic gold medals (2008 and 2012) in the 94 kg class and lastly, won the world championship last year in the 105 kg class.  The biggest difference between these three men is Mutlu won his sixth championship at 31 years old and Reza Zadeh at 28 before suddenly retiring.  Ilyin won his sixth at just 26 years old and likely has several more years of top level competition… especially since he’s still breaking world records.

WHAT COUNTRY IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD?

                This is a question that is somewhat obvious and surprising at the same time.  China has entered 124 lifters in the international competitions while Russia has entered 122.  China has had 74 of those lifters reach the podium and 106 make it into the top ten.  Russia has had 56 top 3’s and 102 top 10’s over the same time span.  The only country that has more wins that Russia is Iran with 15.

                Perusing this list of countries (and going slightly beyond the top ten) a pattern began to emerge.  On this list of podium finishes, Russia finished second and Belarus 9^th.  Just outside the top ten in 11^th and 12^th were Kazakhstan and Armenia and then in 18^th and 19^th place were Azerbaijan and Latvia.  It just so happens that those are all former Soviet states.  The next question became obvious… what would the above list look like if the former Soviet states were re-combined?

                First of all, this is what the 15 former Soviet states have done in world class weightlifting over the past seventeen years.  Needless to say, a very impressive showing from countries other than Russia.  Put them back together, and this is how the rankings change.

                First and foremost, the Soviets would not have been able to enter 912 lifters if they were still one country.  In such competitions, there are limits to how many athletes can go but the point of this exercise was simply to show, culturally speaking, where weightlifting is most popular around the world.  On average, 53.6 lifters have come to the world championships or to the Olympics from former Soviet states each year.  Their 375 top ten finishes are more than triple China’s 106.

                Put all of that together and 48.5% of the world champions, 50.7% of the silver medalists, and 41.9% of the bronze medalists have come from either China or a former Soviet state.