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Before the 2024 Championships ended in León, Spain last week, the last time a World Junior Championships was held in an Olympic year was in 2021 in Tashkent.

Among the winners in the Uzbekistan capital were the Paris 2024 Olympic champions Rizki Juniansyah from Indonesia and Olivia Reeves from the United States. Few people outside their own country had heard of them at the time.

Other future Olympians won junior world titles three years ago – Sergio Massidda from Italy, Muhammed Furkan Ozbek from Turkey, Garik Karapetyan from Armenia and Kamila Konotop from Ukraine all lifted in Paris, and Hristo Hristov from Bulgaria competed at the delayed 2020 Games in Tokyo a few months after becoming junior world champion.

Shahzadbek Matyakubov (TKM)

Among those who won silver or bronze in Tashkent were Mihaela Cambei from Romania, Nina Sterckx from Belgium and Yekta Jamali, then lifting for Iran and now a medal-winning member of the Weightlifting Refugee Team. They competed in Paris too, where Cambei won a silver medal.

During the three years between winning in Tashkent and competing in Paris, those 2021 junior world champions trained harder, got stronger and improved their best competitive totals by huge amounts. The biggest female improver was Reeves, up 39kg, while Karapetyan did best of the men, up 46kg.

The stars from León have four years rather than three before the next Olympics. While they may be “unknown” as of now, you may well hear much more about them in the coming years.

Some of the best juniors did not win. Remarkably, the IWF’s “best lifter” rankings, based on Robi points, featured three silver medallists in the men’s top six.

In the best competition of the Championships, the men’s 102kg, winner Shahzadbek Matyakubov from Turkmenistan and runner-up Matheus Pessanha from Brazil both broke world records. Shahzadbek, ranked best individual in León, will go for more world records at the senior World Championships in Bahrain in December.

Kwon Dae Hee (KOR)

Kwon Dae Hee from Korea, ranked second, was within 8kg of Karlos Nasar’s clean and jerk junior record when he made his final attempt at 200kg. That was at 81kg, and nobody in the 89kg or 96kg sessions matched it. Four men from the 81kg contest were ranked in the top nine.

There was no doubt about the best individual female – 55kg junior world record breaker Chen Guan-Ling, who is also the senior world champion. Chen had four junior world records in outperforming her senior gold medal total by 14kg.

Ingrid Segura (COL)

The 64kg and 71kg champions, Ingrid Segura from Colombia and Charlotte Simoneau from Canada, were ranked second and third.

United States filled positions four, five and six in the individual rankings – Ella Nicholson, Katie Estep and Miranda Ulrey – and topped the team medals table for the second straight year. Their top-rated male was Hampton Morris, who won a medal in Paris and holds a senior world record. American team-building for their “home” Olympics in 2028 is clearly going very well.

Chen Guan-Ling (TPE)

Even though China and North Korea, the world’s strongest weightlifting nations, did not send teams to Spain, the standard of lifting was very high.

There was an exceptional performance at the concurrent Commonwealth Championships in Fiji, too. Femily Notte from the remote Pacific island of Nauru, who was second in this year’s World Youth Championships in Lima, Peru, swept the youth, junior and senior titles at 64kg with a 220kg total at the age of 15 years four months.

That is better than the current European, African and Pan American youth records, and within 13kg of the world youth record set by Pei Xinyi from China when she was two and a half years older.

By Brian Oliver