One of the most vibrant and common sights at any gym, either at home or wherever you may roam, is the brightly coloured rubber-coated Olympic weight plates that are either next to or attached to a weightlifting barbell.

The concept of the bumper plates was largely standardised beginning in the 1970s and finalised in the 1990s, but at the same time as this, the lifts themselves were also becoming more standard.

One question many gym enthusiasts have is out of the dozens of lift types and almost countless numbers of variations and hybrid exercises is why only two are used in competition weightlifting. 

Moreover, why specifically were the snatch, and the clean and jerk the ones that were chosen to represent weightlifting at a competitive level?

The answer to this, rather unusually, revolves around a completely different lift entirely.

The Third Lift

Weightlifting was at the very first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, but the exact rules left a lot to be desired when it came to fair, unbiased competition.

There was a one-handed lift category similar to the modern two-handed snatch, as well as a two-handed category with a lift similar to the clean and jerk. Given that the winner, Viggo Jensen of Denmark was ultimately decided by Prince George of Denmark based on his form, there was much to be desired when it came to this original format.

When weightlifting returned in 1920, there were one-handed and two-handed snatches and a clean and jerk, whilst in 1924, there was a grand total of five, which was whittled down to three by 1928.

The snatch as well as the clean and jerk are familiar to most weightlifters, but for the first half of the 20th century, they were accompanied by the clean and press as a third regulation lift.

It starts with the same lifting extension as the clean and jerk, but instead of extending the legs as part of the jerk movement, the press is completely straight, with no jerking, leg bending, bending backwards or shifting of the feet.

It is an exceptionally difficult lift because of the level of discipline it requires, and successfully executing one can sometimes be a rite of passage for people who are taking their weightlifting seriously.

However, as difficult as the lift is to execute with competition weights, it is even more difficult to properly judge whether certain movements are “exaggerated” or not, with the former leading to an illegal lift as you could get an unfair advantage and lift more weight by utilising the leg, hip and torso muscles.

International Incident

For the most part, the loose interpretation of the rules was grudgingly accepted, because up until the 1950s, it had always been interpreted the same way by a given set of competition judges.

As long as they were consistent with themselves, it could be forgiven, unlike the rather inconsistent weight categories due to differences between the metric system and imperial measurements.

However, by the 1950s, these interpretations started to cause controversies that stretched far beyond the confines of the weightlifting stage and ended up causing international diplomatic incidents.

In 1956, the coach of the United States Olympic team, Bob Hoffman, outright accused judges of pro-Soviet bias, claiming that they had disqualified American presses that had the same levels of layback and dubious lifting techniques that the Soviet Union had used.

The issue was the use of the word “exaggerated” in the rules, which did not make it at all clear where the line was between a slight lean back to retain the balance of the considerable Olympic weights and what was an illegal attempt to cheat.

Whilst Mr Hoffman was making a particularly vociferous allegation that the international judges were either currying favour, threatened or even bribed to allow Soviet illegal lifts and disqualify American lifts that were deemed to be legal, ultimately the issue was that nobody could be certain what a “correct” clean and press lift even was.

One solution was to just make layback legal, but given the unnatural forces on a lifter’s back, this could have caused extreme back injuries at the highest levels of competition.

This was a problem that predated the Soviet Union’s entry and domination of Olympic weightlifting but ended up contributing somewhat to Cold War tensions given the role competitive success played as part of the relations between the USSR and USA.

By the 1970s, the International Weightlifting Federation had had quite enough of the standoff, and in a range of measures to change and standardise the sport removed it entirely, leading to the biathlon event we know and love today.