When we last attempted to project this sport, we were trying to guess which 10 athletes would be picked from each country. Those memories had been repressed for a while.

Now it’s a little easier. We have the final entry list with everyone’s qualifying weight. And when you consider weightlifting has no wind or mud that can affect someone’s performance, it’ll take a lot for us to go against the entry list. You might say the federation has done the heavy lifting for us.

(Hey, only two more posts to go. You can deal with another bad pun or two.)

Well, sort of. The qualifying weights don’t include the 2011 numbers, so we may take a peek at those as well. Especially when the Chinese lifters aren’t at the top of the 2012 list.

Also, if you’re going to be competing in London, you apparently can’t eat geraniums.

Away we go.

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We simply can’t write about weightlifting without calling in this classic Saturday Night Live bit:

A sport that measures sheer strength at its core does indeed provide temptation to cheat. But the 30 reported doping incidents in 2009 (see PDF) are still less than the number reported in, say, cycling. These folks know the rules.

Asia is the hotbed for this sport these days. China won nine medals at home in 2008, Russia took seven, and South Korea, Kazakhstan and Belarus combined for 10.

World Championships are held in every non-Olympic year, so we have 2010 results to check out now while we await the 2011 edition in November.

But rankings in weightlifting are the most objective in any Olympic sport. They’re not based on points from various competitions. They’re based on how much weight someone lifted. Whether the athlete lifted that much weight in a World Championship or smaller competition doesn’t really matter. It’s still the same weight. Even track and field has a few variables, such as wind and temperature, that affect an athlete’s times and distances.

So we’ll make these projections really simple. The sole basis will be the 2010 rankings. And we’ll come back and re-check after the World Championships in 2011.

It’s just that simp … wait … it’s not? Each country can only nominate 10 athletes, two per event? Six men, four women.

Grrrrrr. OK, we’ll try to bear that in mind. And naturally, it’ll be relevant — China won 11 medals at Worlds.

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