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Yousefi offers ray of hope for rejuvenated Iranian weightlifting
Of the men’s 30 medals up for grabs in Manama, Iranian men accounted for 10, with superheavyweight prodigy Alireza Yousefi spearheading the haul with a gold and a bronze on the final day, as head coach Navvab Nasirshalal’s team collected 560 points to finish runner-up to China.
The race for the +109kg glory was always going to be wide open in the absence of reigning three-time Olympic champion Lasha Talakhadze, with Armenian Varazdat Lalayan and the host’s Gor Minasyan – silver and bronze winners in the Paris Games – as well as Iranian Ali Davoudi the favorite trio to end the Georgian sensation’s nine-year dominance in the weight class.
Lalayan completed all three attempts to come out on top in the snatch contest with a best lift of 215kg, leading the Bahraini silver medalist by 10 kilograms, while Davoudi settled for the bronze with 206kg.
Yousefi missed out on the snatch podium after registering 194kg in his third attempt to stand fifth – next to Iraq’s world junior record holder Ali Ammar Rubaiawi – but went on to steal the show in the clean & jerk event.
The two-time world junior champion began his campaign with a 248kg attempt and made a quick work of securing the C&J gold with a second effort of 258kg.
A sensational 262kg lift saw the 21-year-old tally 456kg for the total bronze, while Davoudi finished on 206-253-459 to add the C&J and total silvers to his snatch bronze, thanks to a new personal total high.
“When I first joined the national team’s training camp my personal records were 170kg and 220kg but I had to work hard for four months with an injured knee, though I was blessed with coaching staff’s great support throughout that period. I can’t still believe I did such a great job here,” Yousefi said, though he acknowledged he would still need to “improve my snatch performance.”
“I’ll keep training hard as I’m keen on overtaking all my rivals in the future competitions and ultimately succeed in the Olympics,” added the Iranian young gun.
Lalayan, meanwhile, took the C&J bronze before grabbing a second gold in the Bahraini capital with a 215-252-467 record – a first world superheavyweight champion other than Talakhadze since Russian Ruslan Albegov made a clean sweep of triple golds in 2014.
The final-day triumphs came after Ali A’alipour, Alireza Moeini, and Mahdi Karami had collected five medals for Iran earlier in the competition.
A’alipour and Moeini won three medals – the snatch silver plus the C&J and total bronzes – between them in the 96kg weight class, with Karami taking the snatch and total bronzes of the 109kg contests.
With an average age of 22 years and 10 months, the 10-man squad, which also included teenagers Alireza Nassiri, Abolfazl Zare’, and Ariya Paydar, was the youngest Iranian team to ever finish on the world podium, much to the delight of Nasirshalal.
“This is one of the youngest squads in the history of the Iranian weightlifting and has much more room for improvement. All the team members put in their best effort during six months of training. I think the runner-up spot was a decent outcome for them, given the Iranian team had won only a couple of medals last year,” said the head coach.