But a 15-year-old boy in small-town South Carolina is raising hopes for an American weightlifting renaissance. His name is C.J. Cummings, and at the 2015 USA Weightlifting National Championships this month in Dallas, he set a national record. In a sport where athletes typically peak in their mid to late 20s, this teenager lifted more than any American grown-up in his weight class had ever achieved.
“In 37 years of coaching, I’ve never seen anything like this kid,” said Dennis Snethen, coach of the U.S. team at the Beijing Olympics and a former longtime top executive of USA Weightlifting. “He’s the Michael Jordan of weightlifting in America.”
That praise may sound faint, considering America’s lack of stature in the sport: Its last two Olympic medals, awarded to women, came at Sydney 2000.
But as a youth, Cummings is becoming a force on the international stage. At the junior worlds this June in Poland, Cummings competed as a 15-year-old against athletes as old as 20 and finished fourth in the clean and jerk and seventh overall. At the nationals this month, his clean and jerk of 175 kilograms (about 386 pounds) broke not only the American national senior record but also exceeded by two kilograms the international youth record in his weight class (69 kilograms, or about 152 pounds). That record was unofficial, because it didn’t occur at an international meet. But even on an unofficial basis, it tops anything any American weightlifter has accomplished in decades.
No American man competed in Cummings’ weight class at the 2012 London Olympics. Of 18 international men who competed in that weight class in London, four racked up scores below Cummings’s score at the nationals this month of 306 kilograms, a combination of his snatch and clean-and-jerk lifts. But that number falls far below the 332 that won a bronze medal at those Games.