What Can We Learn From The Lost Olympic Weightlifting Event?

Weightlifting is very closely connected to the Olympic Games, and has appeared at the first ever modern incarnation and every running of the world’s biggest athletics competition since 1920.

This is part of the reason why a threat to remove weightlifting from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles was so shocking; given that it had been there forever, it was seen as akin to removing cycling, fencing or the 110-metre hurdles.

However, unlike those events, weightlifting has technically not always been a universal presence; according to the International Olympic Committee, weightlifting was not an Olympic event in the 16 years between the St Louis Olympics in 1904 and the 1920 Games in Antwerp, Belgium.

Between that time, however, there was a very unusual weightlifting competition which took place in a strange Olympic Games, which has since become known as the “forgotten games”.

Known officially today as the Intercalated Games, the 1906 Olympic Games came from unusual circumstances and, despite having a diminished status today, are important not only for the effect they had on both weightlifting and the Olympics as a whole.

What Were The Intercalated Games?

Unlike the transcendental showcase of athletic achievement the Olympic Games are today, many of the early editions of the event were at best relegated to sideshows of World’s Fairs and at worst were outright debacles.

Following the confusion surrounding the 1900 Olympics in Paris and the disgraces at the 1904 Olympics, a plan was agreed for an intermediate Olympic Games to be arranged in Athens in 1906, between 1904 and the London Olympic Games in 1908.

The Intercalated Games saved the Olympics; they were not sideshows of a World’s Fair, were remarkably well-organised for the time, and contemporary publications considered them to be the benchmark for the modern games. 

Most notably, the 1906 Games had:

• National Olympic Committees to which athletes were registered, rather than registering as largely separate individuals.

• Official Opening and Closing Ceremonies.

• An Olympic Village.

• Medal Ceremonies with the raising of flags.

• A duration of two weeks rather than up to six months.

How Did Weightlifting At The Intercalated Games Work?

Whilst the early weightlifting events still lacked the Olympic-standard weight plates we are used to today, they still took place outdoors and were still an openweight category. There was a shift towards the importance of form and an early indication of how the competition would evolve going forward.

It consisted of two events: a one-handed dumbbell lift and a two-handed lift, the latter of which would cause a remarkable level of controversy in its time.

The 1906 Weightlifting Controversy

The undisputed weightlifting champion of the world at the time was Josef Steinbach of Austria, who had won in 1904 and the multiple world championships which took place in 1905.

Whilst he won the one-handed event handily, he would infamously struggle at the two-handed event due to the particular rules established during the games.

Mr Steinbach used a technique similar to a deadlift, where the weight is moved to the waist before being transitioned to the shoulders. This was known at the time as the “continental style”.

However, this was a violation of the rules for Olympic weightlifting at the time, which required the weight to move from the ground to the shoulders without stopping or touching the body outside of incidental contact.

Mr Steinbach tried but ultimately failed, with his three attempts described in Spalding’s Athletic Library as being “baby-like”, before he dropped the weight in disgust. He would ultimately lose to Greek Dimitrios Tofalos.

After Mr Tofalos won with a weight of 142.4kg, Mr Steinbach tried one more time in his own style, easily lifting it continental-style and doing six overhead jerks in succession to prove his strength.

This led to the crowd believing he had been robbed of victory, even if it was ultimately an act of unsportsmanlike behaviour.

How Did The Intercalated Games Change Weightlifting?

Ultimately, the controversy made it clear how important form was becoming to the sport of weightlifting, and in the 14 years between the Intercalated Games and the return of weightlifting in Antwerp, the rules fundamentally changed.

Gone were the openweight criteria, instead replaced with weight classes that have conceptually remained but have been altered ever since.

As well as this, the separation between one-handed and two-handed lifting was gone, replaced with what was initially a three-phase event, briefly became a five-phase event and is now a two-phase biathlon of lifts, with the combined total of the highest legal lifts determining the winner.

Without the 1906 Games, their success and the controversy surrounding the world’s best lifter at the time, this might not have happened, and weightlifting as we know it today may have looked very different.