Topic: News: Sarah Robles becomes a heavyweight in weightlifting

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Sarah Robles becomes a heavyweight in weightlifting
By Philip Hersh

When Sarah Robles transferred from Alabama to Arizona State to be a redshirt thrower on the track team, she found herself looking for a place to lift in the week before the school's athletic facilities reopened.

Robles looked on USA Weightlifting's Web site to find a club in the area and wound up with Joe Micela at his Performance One Advanced Sports Training in Mesa, Ariz.

It was a Thursday afternoon in early January 2008 when she met Micela, who suggested Robles try a local weightlifting competition four days later. She did well enough to qualify for the junior national championships.

"That blew me away," Micela said.

That was the beginning of the end for her throwing and the start of a weightlifting career in which Robles' progress has been so fast she has legitimate aspirations at making the 2012 Olympic team in the super-heavyweight category.

That is the weight class in which former child prodigy lifter Cheryl Haworth, currently recovering from an injury, has been in a class by herself among U.S. women for a decade. Haworth, 26, won an Olympic bronze medal in 2000 and followed it with sixth places in 2004 and 2008.

"If Sarah had started when she was 12 or 14, she could be Cheryl—or close to it," Micela said.

Barely six months after the local competition, Robles had finished second in the World Junior Championships and decided to leave Arizona State to train and study at the U.S. Olympic Education Center at Northern Michigan University.

Now the 20-year-old from San Jacinto, Calif., wants to move again, and she hopes her results Sunday in the Pan American Weightlifting Championships will earn her a place at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

In her first senior international competition, Robles took sixth after setting personal bests in the snatch (214 pounds), clean-and-jerk (284) and total (498). That made her U.S. champion but left Robles short of her goal.

"I held myself to bring home a medal for my country, so I didn't do my job," Robles said.

No U.S. women won medals but two men, Norik Vardanian of Moorpark, Calif., (207-pound class) and Patrick Judge of Sarasota, Fla., (super-heavyweight) took overall bronzes in the four-day Pan Am event that ended Sunday at UIC.

Robles was 4.4 pounds short of a medal in clean-and-jerk and some 14 shy of an overall medal. She would need to lift about 90 more pounds to contend for an Olympic medal.

"My Olympic lifts are still catching up to my strength," Robles said. "But I'm new to the sport."

In 18 months, Robles has upped her total by a whopping 132 pounds.

"For someone in their 20s to make that kind of improvement is rare," Micela said. "But Sarah is a natural athlete."

The top two finishers in Robles' class, Seledina Nieve of Ecuador and three-time Olympian Eva Dimas of El Salvador, both are in their 30s. Robles was the youngest of the heavyweights.