Chinese weightlifting ended up with 5 golds this time to Noko's 6. We'll see what drug testing can do but I'm not too hopeful because it takes some serious fking up to fail an in competition test. China also just wrapped up the World's a month ago where Noko did not attend so 2 golds that we had steady slipped away from athlete fatigue. Fat Li Wenwen could not appear in the superheavy category and Liao Guifang, whose score at the Worlds was significantly higher than even the doped up Noko score from yesterday, bailed out of the competition after the second attempt to prevent injury.
That said, China has an incredible rising star. Liu Huanhua AKA Gigachad, is on a trajectory that is almost unheard of. He showed promise last year as an 89kg lifter doing 166+215. This year, he went up to 102kg and in his first competition, went 175+210 (we went right to 223 but failed so his real power was somewhere in between), second comp went 180+224 in the same category, but just now, he lifted as a 109kg lifter (he was just an overweight 102; he definitely had no time to fill out to 109 but just was able to attend without cutting weight so likely something like 105kg) and made 185+233! He won the gold medal for China beating out the reigning Olympic+World Champion and the former Olympic Champion, both guys who are total veterans of the category! This guy is one to watch and although they called him Gigachad before he had the numbers to back it up, he's certainly earning it now!
China's gold count is at 187 out of 433 so far. There are a total of 480 so China needs 13/47 to make or 14/47 to beat the 200 number. Looks like it will happen but could get a little choppy cus China's best events are behind it. Regardless, China got 199/477 in Guangzhou 2010 so I hope China can beat that but we're not getting anywhere near our best performance which was 1990 Beijing were we took 183/310 golds, meaning just shy of 60%!
Despite my joke about India just going to sporting event for free food, they are doing really well for themselves this year with 22 golds, behind the top 3 China (187), Japan (47), SK (36) of course but that is absolutely a historic performance considering India's track record.
