As the competition is packed down and the athletes and officials drift gently back to their home nations, it’s a good time to reflect on the World Classic and Equipped Bench Press Championships just gone.
This competition included both classic and equipped lifters and all age categories from sub-junior all the way up to Masters 4 so we had a full 10 days of lifting. We saw 673 performances in the championship (387 classic and 286 equipped) but 80 athletes competed twice so, in all, there were 593 athletes (380 men and 213 women) from 33 countries. Amongst these, we saw father and son competing, sisters taking world titles, teammates coaching each other and 22 double world champions.
ROC took home the most gold medals with an incredible 42, 11 of them in the open categories. Kazakhstan was second with 28 and third place was shared with Ukraine, Sweden and Finland all having 13 new world champions.
29 world records were broken, 7 of them in the open categories. These included an open world record taken by a junior lifter - Selma Ramberg in the 52kg class with 113.5kg - and the biggest female raw bench ever done in an IPF competition - Liudmila Protchenko in the 84s with 155kg, exceeding the open world record in the 84+kg class. The standard of lifting continues to rise, especially in the women’s categories.
Gaston Parage, IPF President: “The World Bench Press Championships was a huge success and we are grateful to Erlandas Petrauskas and his team for stepping in and organising such a wonderful competition with such short notice after the cancellation in Kazakhstan.”
There was a great sense of sportsmanship and team spirit at this competition with noisy support from the audience and a real buzz and energy in the venue. Many of the athletes took the opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing before returning home and we know that they will all look forward to the next opportunity to return to Lithuania and the great welcome we had there. Until the next time!
3rd November 2021
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