LIFTING THE NATION

It must have been one of the most guarded secrets in the XXXII Tokyo Olympiad, something even the weightlifting president was clueless about except being told that “Hidilyn Diaz was going to put on a show.”

- TITO S. TALAO

“One of her coaches told me that we’re in for a surprise. I don’t know what it is but I understand that she will be putting on a show,” said Monico Puentevella, head of the Samahang Weightlifting ng Pilipinas shortly before last Monday’s 55kg division competition at the Tokyo International Forum.

That surprise came in the form of a 127kg lift in the clean and jerk category, a heave nobody outside her own team knew Diaz could pull off— not Uzbekistan’s Muattar Nabieva, who set an Olympic record in the snatch with 98kg; not Kazakhstan’s Zulfiya Chinshanlo, who was in contention until she no-lifted 125kg in the clean and jerk; and, most likely, not Chinese world record holder Qiuyun Liao, who probably thought 126kg on her third and last attempt was enough to win it after Diaz had successfully gone for 124kg on her second attempt.

It was here, when everything was on the line and an entire nation was holding its breath to see what the weightlifting pride of Brgy. Mampang, Zamboanga City — a silver medalist in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics who got stranded for more than a year in Malaysia due to the pandemic lockdown there — was going to do, did the Games’ biggest secret this side of the continent got unravelled.

When the electronic board flashed 127kg, indicating Diaz was going for the ultimate prize — the country’s first-ever Olympic gold medal after 97 years of participation in the Games dating back in 1924 in Amsterdam — the venue, a huge auditorium embedded inside an even more mammoth convention center, began to rock.