Day 2 of the open category began with the 74kg class. Home country hero Alexander Eriksson had a shaky start with a technical fail on his first squat and then missed his third for resting his elbows on his quads. This opened the door for strong favourites Paul Rembauville of France and Yakov Ionin of Kazhakstan.
Eriksson’s gold medal on bench at 180kg closed the gap somewhat and Rembauville’s struggles with bench saw him drop back to 6th place. In fact, less than 20kg covered the top 6 lifters at sub-total with Ionin leading the way but we expected Rembauville to pull back strongly on the deadlift.
Ionin missed his opening deadlift, and we went into the second round with a 5kg spread covering the other 5 contenders. Ionin hit his deadlift on the second attempt but so did everyone else and we headed into the final stages of the competition with Eriksson and Rambauville only 2.5kg ahead of Ionin who was himself only 2.5kg ahead of Germany’s Joshua Wright and Turkey’s Unal Yakup. It’s rare that a world championship could go any one of five ways right at the sharp end and this gave us some incredibly exciting viewing.
However, the only one of these lifters to make a successful deadlift in the 3rd round was Eriksson and this carried the day, giving Sweden their very first open classic world champion on home turf.
Watch it back here https://youtu.be/UgWm11w14KA
1st October 2021
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