I flew back from Paris a week ago after spending a week at the quasi-hellish place most commonly known as Disneyland Paris. No, I didn’t fly all the way to Paris to visit a boring theme park. I went there for the 2011 World Weightlifting Championships, also known as the WWC. One of the main reasons I went was because high level weightlifting competitions really don’t happen all that often. There are high level competitions like the Europe championships and the Asian Games but those obviously don’t feature lifters from all over the world. In fact, pretty much the only competitions that draw the best lifters from all over the world are the annual WWC and the Olympics (there isn’t a WWC during Olympic years). Since tickets are nearly impossible to come by for London, my next chance to see this sort of competition wouldn’t be until 2013 when the WWC will be in Warsaw. And I’m guessing that a lot of top lifters will take some time off after the Olympics so the quality of the lifting won’t be quite as high in 2013. So anyway, this was really my only chance for at least two years — if not more. Oh, and 2014 is Kazakhstan and 2015 is Houston. If I’m still into this stuff then I will definitely go to Houston. Kazakhstan sounds pretty awesome but I’d only go if I could avoid Soviet-era planes. Those Tupolevs that crash every other week are scary.

Anyway, on to the trip. The flight over was pretty smooth. I tried to get an upgrade from coach but unfortunately it didn’t clear so I was in coach. However, due to my status with Continental I was in an exit row so I had plenty of legroom. Also, the woman next to me was pretty small so overall the flight was pretty much as comfortable as it can be in coach. But I still didn’t manage to sleep all that much which made my first day in Europe a bit rough.

I arrived at Charles De Gaulle airport at 10am, met my friends who had flown over separately from Las Vegas and took the TGV directly to Disneyland Paris. It turns a 30-45 minute car ride into a 9 minute train ride at 100-something miles per hour. Really awesome. The train is so smooth and quiet. And fast. I can’t repeat that enough. I’ve never been on an Amtrak train that fast, even including the Acela. Although I have heard the Acela goes faster in parts of Connecticut, I’ve never been on the Acela in those areas. I love fast stuff so the train was a great start (although I should mention that I’d just spent 7 hours going 550 MPH). Once at the Disneyland Paris train stop, we switched trains to the RER A which is the local train. After that we took a bit of a wrong turn when Google Maps led me astray by mapping the hotel to the wrong spot. Either way we figured it out quickly and ended up at our hotel pretty soon after. The hotel was only one stop from Disneyland Paris and it was right by the tracks so it was actually super convenient. In an attempt to stay awake, we immediately left the hotel and grabbed some food, followed by heading back to the WWC venue for some afternoon weightlifting.

I was pretty tired so I really can’t remember most of the session that we watched. I do remember that the American lifter Amanda Sandoval was lifting so that means I was probably watching the 58kg female lifters. Here’s a video of Amanda competing in a prior event where she snatches (for those non-lifters, she basically throws the weight over her head in one movement) almost 190 lbs:

And no, she’s not bulky like you’d might think if you subscribe to conventional — but horribly wrong — wisdom in the US and some other parts of the world. I really wish that more girls would take up lifting as it would make them way hotter.

After getting a bunch of sleep Monday night, I woke up on Tuesday ready to watch some lifting and take some pictures. After all, I was there partially for business. I need a lot of pictures for the new weightlifting-related website so I needed to attend as many sessions as I could handle. And I definitely needed to go to all of the final sessions (also known as A sessions) where the best lifters were lifting in each category.

I don’t really have the energy to write about every session. Nor do I think my blog readers care to read about every session. But I ended up attending something like 23 or 24 sessions. Each session consisted of approximately 10 lifters (it varied, sometimes 8, sometimes 12) each performing six lifts total. Each lift is usually spaced out by around 45 seconds plus there is a 10 minute break at the halfway point. So I’m estimating that I saw somewhere around 1500 lifts performed. And about five of those were world records (although only one male world record) and well over a dozen were world record attempts. Overall the lifting was really great.

I also managed to get a lot of good pictures. I ended up with roughly 5,600 pictures of about 250 of the best male and female lifters in the world. Here’s a very small sampling:

I’m just pumped for Poland in 2013 now! I’ll probably write up more about this trip at some point soon.

Related posts:

1. 2011 US Weightlifting Senior Nat’l Championships
2. UFC 88: Initial Trip Report
3. M83 Concert & DC Trip
4. Nearing the end of Costa Rica trip
5. Versace silliness & Congo trip report