[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
[quote]Ajax wrote:
The argument that US lifters’ main shortcoming is a sheer lack of strength, and if they trained liked powerlifters they would be more successful does not convince me. In particular, the author’s assertion that US lifters spend too much time training the competitive lifts and that this accounts for their relatively poor international performance is logically weak. The fact is that the best olympic programs around the world focus on the competitive lifts; that is not a peculiarity of the American program.
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So our team doesn’t focus more on technique than other successful countries?
Any answer as to why we seem to have fallen from grace? What is different?
Is it just a lack of national interest? Top athletes go into other sports?[/quote]
In response to your three questions, here are my thoughts:
a) I know other teams constantly work on technique. They may, however, do it differently than than the Americans. Or rather, the Americans might be doing it differently than the rest of the world. One basic problem I have noted in discussions of o-lifting is that people routinely draw a false distinction between technique and lifting heavy. The distinction is false in that better technique enables you to lift heavier weights. That’s seemingly obvious, but I often get the sense that people unfamiliar with o-lifting fail to distinguish the two. Sometimes they dismiss the staggering feats of strength performed by top o-lifters by saying its “all” or “largely” technique. Or, they make the opposite conclusion, that if American o-lifters would just man up, grab the damn bar, and throw it up – they would become internationally competitive. This is absurd. Top international lifters are ferociously strong and generate astounding amounts of power with extreme precision.
To be fair to the author of that linked article, the above is not his argument. Rather, his argument seems to be that Americans make a fetish out of technique, and spend too much time lifting with light or no weight in a vain effort to polish “technique.” Maybe that is the case, but I doubt American coaches beyond the club level are that clueless.
The squat (back or front) generally correlates strongly to the competitive lifts. So one way to test the author’s hypothesis would be to compare the ratio between the squats and competitive lifts of American lifters to the same ratio for foreign lifters. If the American ratio is less, i.e. the difference between the squat and competitive lifts is closer to one, that would suggest that American lifters are more technically proficient than their rivals and so would benefit from focusing more on building strength. If the ratio is greater, that would suggest that Americans would benefit more from improving their technique. But again, technical proficiency and heavy lifting are complementary, not clashing.
b) I think the decline of US lifting at the end of the 1960s is explained by two things. One is that after WWII the Soviets, (followed by the other East Bloc countries, particularly Bulgaria) had succeeded in building a mass infrastructure for sports. They had some success at the end of the 1950s, and within another decade were coming on strong in a range of sports. That infrastructure consisted of two things: 1) a large base of athletes, beginning at the youth level; 2) a large cohort of formally trained coaches. This latter point, I think, was especially important. The Soviets made coaching a real profession and put science into their education and their programming. I think these two factors are much more important than use of anabolics, which after all were/are used widely in the West. The Chinese have now created an even larger infrastructure, especially for weightlifting.
The second part of the explanation is the decline, even collapse, of o-lifting in the US. This is tied up with the surge of popularity in bodybuilding and the emergence of powerlifting in the 1960s and 1970s. Both sucked away most of the popular interest in o-lifting. Business and commerce was part of this. Bob Hoffman and his York Barbell dominated weightlifting. The Wieders saw more money in bodybuilding and beat Hoffman. A good book on this is John Fair’s Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell.
c) the diversion of athletes into other sports is perhaps part of the question, but a small one I think. As someone noted above, American football might be luring away potential heavyweights, but certainly not lightweights. The far bigger factor I think is the sheer lack of infrastructure for the sport. How many American kids have access to a decent coach and facilities at age 12, or even later?
and olifters are lazy bastidges and don’t want to reload the bar often 
