IWF120y/50 – 1976: Mixed feelings at the Montreal Games

From an organisational point of view, the 1976 Montreal Olympics were praised as a huge success, and in the case of Weightlifting they will be remembered as the first ones close to the present Games format. Still only accessible to men, and with nine bodyweight categories, they represented a considerable change since the 1928 edition, when three lifts (Press, Snatch, and Clean & Jerk) had to be performed during the weightlifting competition. In Canada, the Press movement was no longer on the programme after the IWF had decided to abolish it from its competitions, starting in 1973. With Snatch and Clean & Jerk firmly established on the programme (as is the case today), 173 lifters travelled to Montreal. 24 of them (13.9%) could not get a valid result in the Games, clearly an unsuccessful ratio for our Sport. Out of these 24 athletes, 16 bombed out either in the Snatch or C&J, but most dramatically eight were disqualified following the first-ever in-competition doping tests for the detection of anabolic steroids. In an event dominated by athletes from the Soviet Union (photo – Aleksandr Voronin, winner in the 52kg), two winners were namely stripped of their gold medals: Zbigniew Kaczmarek (POL, 67.5kg) and Valentin Christov (BUL, 110kg). They sadly remain in history as the first Olympic winners in our Sport to lose their title after having tested positive for prohibited substances. In all of the nine weightlifting bodyweight categories contested in Montreal, there was at least one lifter either bombing out or disqualified!