IWF120y/73 – 2000: Tara Nott (USA), the first female lifter with Olympic gold

On September 17, 2000 the weightlifting family was in a celebratory mode at the Sydney Olympics. On that day, after more than 100 years only with male participation, the Games presented the first-ever female competition, the women’s 48kg category. It was the beginning of a successful road that presently encompasses perfect gender equality between men and women in the greatest sports event on the planet (in Paris 2024, weightlifting was represented by 60 male and 60 female lifters). After fierce competition at that inaugural event, Tara Nott, from the United States, finishes second (82.5-102.5-185) behind Izabela Dragneva, from Bulgaria. Three days later, the European lifter tests positive for a prohibited substance and loses her gold medal. Even if other women’s weightlifting events had taken place in the meantime, Nott becomes ‘de facto’ and in the history books the first-ever female Olympic champion in weightlifting. Born in 1972, Nott (later married to US wrestler Casey Cunningham) is a sport addict, who excels in many of them. She is the only athlete to have trained at the highest level in three different sports (gymnastics, soccer, and weightlifting) at the US Olympic Training Center! After winning the gold at the 1999 Pan-American Games (she is ninth in the same year at the IWF Worlds – photo), Nott gives the US an Olympic gold medal in a sport where their last champion had been Chuck Vinci, in 1960. She remains one of the two US female lifters with an Olympic gold – Olivia Reeves accomplished the same feat 24 years later, at last year’s Paris Games. Nott revalidates her Pan-American title in 2003, but at the 2004 Athens Olympics, she finishes 10th.