News

David James Luckes (43) helped in UK2012 Olympic bid and is now in charge of Sport Competition for London Organizing Committee. Yesterday he visited the competition Arena.

“It is a very interesting place to run a World Championship. The Dome is really very atmospheric, it has its own flavor. In terms of my short stay just to come to see what to learn, how we can develop our plans. I had a team of six people spent a week here working with the Organizing Committee understanding lot of the actual details. We have learnt all the lessons we could learn from this competition.” – He said.

Q: Just 260 days before the Games start what more to learn?

A: We can always learn how to do things better. The key thing for us is working in a team. Our team operates with the athletes, operates with officials, we learnt how to work with IWF. Of course there are certain elements fixed like how the competition arena is set up, our plans are 99 percent fixed, but always the small details are important, you have to deal with that little one percent we are still looking for. We must learn how to provide the athletes with really great experience instead of good experience. We are looking for the elements of sports presentation. The theatrical elements of weightlifting are very interesting; the spectator involvement must be focused as well. One thing is put on the event and one thing to put on sport. The spectators are the part of the game.
We see what happened in Beijing, we see what happened at previous World Championships, and we are looking to build upon this experiences and we just wish to improve the level, to move it on expressing our predecessors all had a great job, of course. But sport evolves and we have to evolve with that sport as well.

Q: Nine month to a child to be born. This is the last nine months for you to be ready to present the world your ideas realized. Nine months are enough to finish your work as you are dreaming about?

A: I hope we are not late. We have a test event coming up in about six weeks time. It is a nice opportunity to see exactly where we are. With other sports we have so far 19 test events and lot of positive feedback of International Federations we received. Hopefully the weightlifting Test Event is in pretty good shape but it is high time to see the areas we can develop a little bit.

Q: What is your relation to weightlifting sport?

A: My sport was field hockey. I have been in three Olympics in Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney as a goalkeeper. So I did a lot of daily weight training as part of that. I think that is the key thing about weightlifting that everyone in sport has done it as part of the training. But also a great advantage of this sport is easy to understand to spectators. The explanation of the rules of some sports is very complicated, but not with weightlifting. Its simplicity makes it magnetic. I think it is really a fantastic sport.