Ali Ammar Yusur (Photo UWW/Giorgio Scala/Deepbluemedia)
Ali Ammar Yusur is a national hero in Iraq after becoming the country’s first world champion in any Olympic sport. Within minutes of his sensational super-heavyweight victory at the IWF World Championships in Ningbo, Ali Ammar was being hailed as “the world’s strongest man” all over the national TV and news outlets. He is sure of a huge welcome when he returns home from China.
The next big target for 22-year-old Ali Ammar is the Olympic Games podium. He was sixth in Paris when still a junior and after today he will widely be regarded as the gold medal favourite for Los Angeles.
Li Yan, also 22, set two snatch world records on the way to winning the women’s super-heavyweights for China. The host nation ended the Championships with six golds, the same number as PRK, and was also level on silvers, but PRK won three bronzes to China’s two and topped the table again.
Ali Ammar failed with an attempt to better his own snatch world record on 220kg and made the other five lifts for 211-255-466. That was 1kg better than his second-placed finish at the Asian Games last month, where Ali Davoudi won for Iran and Ali Ammar was denied an attempt because of a timing foul-up.
Davoudi and his team-mate Alireza Yousefi both had two attempts remaining after Ali Ammar had finished, and the Olympic silver medallist Varazdat Lalayan from Armenia had one. Nobody caught him, leaving Ali Ammar and his team, including his father and coach Ammar Yusur, to celebrate in the back room.
Lalayan went first and failed at 257kg, completing a disappointing Championships for Armenia – four bombouts, one withdrawal and no athlete made more than three from six. Lalayan’s 210-247-457 made him the only Armenian medallist on total.
Yousefi made 258kg but lost it because of oscillation. Yousefi and the Iran team were clearly unhappy because the rules state “deliberate oscillation” and they claimed the bar was moving without any human intervention.
Remarkably, Yousefi – who was 16kg behind Ali Ammar in snatch – came back to make a world record 263kg and leapfrog Lalayan into second place on 195-263-458.
Davoudi had made 262kg for victory at the Asian Games but this time a 15kg jump to 261kg was beyond him both times. He finished fourth, with a snatch bronze, on 206-246-352.
Daniil Vagaitsev from Russia made all six attempts in fifth place on 194-237-431, continuing his team’s remarkable success rate. They collectively made more than 82 per cent of their lifts – a fraction shy of five from six.
Bohdan Taranenko was sixth for Ukraine on 190-232-422 in his first international competition since his junior years.
Only four super-heavyweights this century have made a total in the 460s by the age of 22 and the other three were in Ningbo – Hossein Rezazadeh and Behdad Salimi with the Iran team, and Lasha Talakhadze, who withdrew from the B Group, with Georgia.
There was far less drama in the women’s contest. Li Yan, cheered on by the entire China team, won by the widest margin of the Championships despite failing with her final two world record attempts.
She made 147-170-317 ahead of Park Hyejeong from Korea. Hyejeong declined twice and made four from four on 125-161-286, and her team-mate Kim Hyoeon was third on 118-159-277. Naryury Perez from Venezuela took snatch bronze and finished fourth on 121-149-270.
