Topic: Doping and the IWF: Lessons from Bulgaria

[Tom Sherwood]

Hey everyone

might be a little off topic here but
just wanted to throw in my two cents on weightlifting in florida, recruiting and retaining, and international success.

As a high school coach I have seen and worked with extremely talented girls and guys.

 I see a lot of people say numbers wont help. I think the right numbers will help. There are TONS of running backs in fla that have speed and are 5'5 140-180 lbs that dont play past high school every year.

 (usaw should be recruiting these guys, calling them, hooking them up with certified coaches, send WL tapes, magazines, etc,) but they dont. so many state champs end up doing nothing past high school.

If we had regional training centers doesnt have to be anything special at all there are plenty of guys that would go to community college work part time, or both to continue competing living in centers that are nothing special just some beds, platforms, kitchen, bathrooms.

No we may not ever dethrone China or Russia but i think we could have deeper teams scoring more points at worlds and pan ams placing higher. thus having more olympic slots

and as far as medals go i think if our girls and guys specialized in the clean and jerk we could snag a lot of bronzes and silvers at worlds. JMHO

[Mike Wittmer]

How many great high school running backs are there, 5'5" to 5'9", 160-190 lbs., that never make it to a college program in football, but would be very good, if not great, lifters?  How about lineman 6'0" 220-240 lbs that are "too small"?

Hey everyone


As a high school coach I have seen and worked with extremely talented girls and guys.

 I see a lot of people say numbers wont help. I think the right numbers will help. There are TONS of running backs in fla that have speed and are 5'5 140-180 lbs that dont play past high school every year.

 (usaw should be recruiting these guys, calling them, hooking them up with certified coaches, send WL tapes, magazines, etc,) but they dont. so many state champs end up doing nothing past high school.

Exactly, I thought so.

[Michael Cayton]

I think both of what Dave and Tom have to say about generating interest in olympic lifting is useful and deserves some serious looking into. One big advantage that olympic lifting has is that it already has the most important equipment available in almost all high schools and colleges. That is, almost all of them have a few olympic sets, and many have platforms or something close enough for general use. And, of course, most of them have people who are using that equipment. So it is not like we need to bring to them totally new and expensive equipment, such as would be the case for something like luge, or fencing, or whatever. What is lacking in most schools is any kind of coaching or expertise, someone to show the lifts, explain how lifting can fit into already training programs such as for football. Visits to such schools & colleges by say a two-person team, a coach and an experienced lifter to give exhibitions/seminars could definitely be useful. The highschool football coach at a Texas school even suggested this to me not long ago. I would bet that tons of such visits could be arranged.

Dave, I hate to sound ignorant, but I don't have any idea of what you mean about 'speed trap' and the Landis book...

[Dave Chiu]

Speed Trap is a very honest book by the coach of Ben Johnson.

Floyd Landis won the Tour De France, but was stripped for a dubious positive, if you have accepted conventional wisdom that he was a cheat, read the book.  After publication, his appeal was decided on by a CYA panel who had at least a significant minority willing to admit that the tag (not the tag-ee) was dirty.