On July 13th 2023, the IWF announced the 10 lifters selected to benefit from the Athlete Direct Support Programme. When Jess and I read this, we were surprised by some names/nations on the list, so we sat down and started to dig a little deeper. We weren’t sure where the conversation would take us but inevitably, money was at the core, because after all, how can athletes, coaches, and officials support the sport they love while keeping a roof over their head and food in the fridge.
First of all, what is the Direct Support programme? In short, it’s designed to “assist international elite athletes to successfully practice the sport of weightlifting with financial support for Olympic potential. The program is designed to identify and support athletes in need for their preparations to qualifying and competing at the 2024 Olympic Games, subject to IWF Technical and Competition Rules & Regulations and IWF Anti-Doping Policy and requirements.” – IWF
The Direct Support Programme (DSP) was announced on April 21st with a specific aim to help athletes get to the Olympics. Our first impression is that this is a clear indication of the IWF’s intent to hold the Olympic Games as a jewel in the crown type competition and that it needs to prove this fact to the IOC. As we know, in recent years, the sport has been rocked by numerous scandals both from an organisational standpoint as well as a doping one and as such, the IOC have cut back on weightliftings’ ‘slot’ in the Olympics. The talk of seeing it as a token comp in the calendar year of just pulling out of it all together should now be put to bed thankfully.
Back to the DSP, so, which Athletes are benefitting?
Rachel ENOCK, Kenya – @Razor_Lifter
Davis NIYOYITA, Uganda – @davisniyoyita_junior
Park HYEJEONG, Korea – @hyejeong030312
Reza DEHDAR, Iran – @reza.dehdar.official
Tham NQUYEN, Ireland – @thammy.complx
Yusuf GENC, Turkey –@yusuf.fehmi.genc
Maria Luz CASADEVALL, Argentina –@luuz_casadevall
Omarie MEARS, Jamaica @omariemears_wl
Dika Loa TOUA, Papua New Guinea (Dika Toua was the first female weightlifter to compete at the Olympic Games five times, if she qualifies for 2024 that will be her sixth and no athlete, male or female, has ever done that.)
David LITI, New Zealand – @davidliti1
Now, looking over that list, there’s instantly a couple of questions that pop up for us. Firstly, well known lifters such as Hye Jeong (you’ll have seen her on Instagram squatting a massive 270kg recently) and Dika Toua (5 time Olympian) are on that list – would you not expect their nations to be supporting their pathway with some kind of high achievers grant? Secondly, would you expect to see countries like Ireland, Turkey and New Zealand show up on this list? If we take into consideration the eligibility criteria limits the grant to those athletes that come from countries which do not have a well-developed support system in place for weightlifting athletes? This lead us down a rabbit hole of investigating how much financial aid governing bodies receive and apportion out to athletes and how much does an athlete actually need as a support package to help them achieve their goals?
While we have a heavy bias towards Technical Official matters at To The Bar, were also competitive athletes ourselves and as such, we are all too aware of the expense of the sport. I purposely didn’t enter the Europeans and Worlds this year due to financial reasons. As most of us know, it’s not just the entry fee for competition, but everything else. The gym membership, the protein shakes and bars, the pre-workout shakes, intra work out shakes, post workout shakes, the micronutrient supplements, macro nutrients from ‘normal’ food, the kit we lift in… the list is endless. And this is just for us as masters’ athletes. The cost that the juniors and seniors must go through is much harder. We fit training and comps in around our day job and as such, train 4-5 times a week. To be at their level, they’re looking at twice a day in some cases as well as using physios, chiros, sports massage, coaches etc. How they fund this is anyone’s guess.
Back to the point in hand.. how do athletes fund this insanely expensive habit? This generally comes in the form of lots of smaller packages of support such as family, part/full time work, local sponsorship, promotional work, regional/national schemes, and let’s not forget, just good old fashioned goodwill. So, you’d jump at the chance to any funding wouldn’t you? Well, thankfully, the IWF set this programme up with the sole goal of filling the gap where national bodies simply don’t have enough funding in place to create a development program to support their athletes. But how much would the IWF’s DSP allocate to each of the 10 athletes? How much would you need to help you get to the Olympics? $5,000? $10,000? $20,000?
Well, the financial package is $3,000 per person, split into 3 separate payments. This can be cut if the IWF feel that, well, to put it bluntly, they’re not seeing a good enough return on their investment. And rightfully so. If we gave someone $3,000 to help them train and the first thing they did was go post pictures of them on a yacht in the Caribbean, well, you’d ask questions right? But it did open our eyes as to the investment in the sport in some of these nations that you’d expect to have a reasonable structure in place. So we dug deeper…
When we look at this list, Ireland stands out as somewhere we’d expect to see support and funding of it’s athletes, even in the shape of providing training facilities, coaching, medical cover etc. However, Weightlifting Ireland only receives €30,000 annual funding from Sport Ireland, so as a result of that, Irish weightlifting clubs and their athletes and coaches typically have to raise their own funds in order to compete at international tournaments, with the national governing body doing its best to reduce those costs. At the 2022 Senior European Championships, Weightlifting Ireland paid for the first three nights’ bed and board; the athletes paid for the other four, as well as for their flights. Now you can imagine the financial drain on these lifters, often in their early twenties, balancing university, elite level training and a part time job is stressful enough as it is, but to qualify to represent your country at an international sporting event and receive little to no financial support in that must be so difficult.
In a similar vein, Weightlifting New Zealand received only a $20,000 stipend in 2019 to support it’s athletes to compete in the 2020 Olympics. Despite having a High-Performance Sport funding pot, similar to Ireland, neither countries yet use this funding to support Olympic Weightlifting, despite both having some extremely high-performing Athletes.
Thankfully, although it’s still not equivalent to what you might find in other sports for their high performance athletes, BWL and Sport UK do have a funding program to, set out to specifically support Athletes with Olympic potential. The program, although it does have a financial element (£5000 per annum) includes much more supportive measures such as access to the best training hubs, coach support from BWL staff, academy national camps and support from BWL medical, physio and sport science personnel. You can read more about that here, if you’re interested.
During our investigative rabbit hole, a reoccurring question came up; How can more investment be made in the sport and how can the community help support the very foundations required to keep the sport in the public eye?
From a major investment side of things, there’s often little we, as individuals can influence, unless of course you work for a national body or work in government. But the company you work for might see a marketing opportunity to sponsor an athlete or a competition so why not ask? But what are the levels of support YOU can do to have a direct impact on the sport we love? As much as we moan about the cost of tickets or having to pay for a livestream do it. Its money in the bank for the governing body that will help the sport and the athletes. We’ve all been guilty, us included, of not paying to watch because we know that a few hours after the comp, it’ll be plastered all over IG or YouTube. But in not buying those tickets, we reduce that pot of money that supports the athletes. After all the reading we’ve done for this piece, we’ll never wait until the end of a comp or wait for other peoples posts to ‘catch up’ on the comp, we’ll be supporting the sport by ticket purchases all the time.
The next obvious way to directly help is by volunteering. Become a Technical Official, obtain your coaching badges, be a loader at a comp, sell tickets on the door. Even reposting ticket sale posts. It all helps. Remember that the more direct input YOU have on supporting the sport, the more indirectly you’ll be helping to support the current amazing batch of lifters struggling to support their dreams of getting to major comps like the Olympics, as well as the stars of the future.
So go out and buy the spectator tickets, use your favourite athletes discount code with their sponsors, volunteer for BWL as a TO, share those amazing lifts on your personal Instagram (post comp!), bring a mate to the gym and so on. Sometimes big changes are needed to make a big difference, but for seismic shifts, they all start with those small changes that we can all make. So, support the sport you love and give back where you can.
As always, we’re interested in what you think. So please drop us a line or leave a comment.
