After a 24-year wait, the United States finally has an Olympic champion in weightlifting.
Olivia Reeves, 21, born three years after Tara Notts won Team USA’s last weightlifting gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, topped the women’s 71kg (156 lbs.) competition at the 2024 Paris Games Friday.
Reeves, a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, successfully completed each of her first five lifts – including an Olympic record snatch of 117kg (258 lbs.) – to win the competition with a total of 262kg (578 lbs.) at her debut Olympics.
She became just the second American weightlifting gold medalist since 1956.
SEE MORE: Olivia Reeves: Meet the athlete
Reeves was perfect in the snatch round, converting on all three of her lifts to lead at the halfway point of the competition. She then converted on her first two attempts at the clean and jerk at 140kg and 145kg, respectively, at which point she had guaranteed herself the gold medal ahead of Colombia’s Mari Sanchez and Ecuador’s Angie Palacios.
With her third and final attempt, Reeves went for a would-be clean and jerk Olympic record of 150kg. The clean came easy enough, but she could not quite get the jerk to stick. No additional Olympic record, but still no shortage of history for the greatest lifter the United States has produced in a generation.
“I’m very excited, overwhelmed, but I’m very grateful,” Reeves said. “I would say it ranks higher than any other competition, it just doesn’t feel real right now.”
Reeves’ historic gold medal came just two days after another historic American weightlifting performance. In the men’s 61kg (134 lbs.), 20-year-old Hampton Morris won bronze to become the first American man to win an Olympic weightlifting medal in 40 years.
Not before the Paris Games had the U.S. won medals in both men’s and women’s weightlifting at the same Olympics.
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