Weightlifting at the 2012 Summer Olympics

The weightlifting events at the 2012 Summer Olympics were held at the ExCeL on the Royal Victoria Dock in London. The site also hosted boxing, fencing, judo, taekwondo, wrestling, and table tennis, making it one of the busiest venues of the Games. The competition format remained the same from 2000, when women’s events were first introduced, and consisted of eight weight divisions for men and seven for women. One noticeable change was the way in which weight increments were dealt with. In previous editions, a competitor had to increase his weight by at least 2.5 kg, but London eliminated the ½ kg divisions entirely, allowing participants to raise their total 1 kg at a time.

China topped the medal table, as it had every year since 2000, with seven, five of them gold, but was less successful than the previous two editions, where they had taken home nine and eight medals respectively. Kazakhstan, who had previously won only one gold medal in weightlifting, came in second in the rankings with four first-place finishes, including Ilya Ilyin, who repeated his golden feat from 2008 in the middle-heavyweight category. Although when the retesting of samples was complete, this left Kazakhstan with just a solitary bronze medal.

Asia initially dominated the women’s events, winning all of the gold medals (although later drug disqualifications would later change that), and also did quite well initially in the men’s tournament, with six of the eight gold medals there. The Americas were more successful than they had been in the previous edition, taking home three medals, two more than in 2008, with Canada’s Christine Girard earning her nation’s first weightlifting medal since 1984 (and its first ever for women).

Eleven Olympic and eight world records fell over the course of the tournament, many of which were broken repeatedly over the course of the event. Perhaps the most disappointing event in this regard was the men’s heavyweight, where three of the favorites did not start and a fourth was unable to produce a total in the snatch. Oleksiy Torokhtiy of Ukraine won this event with a total lift of 412 kg, a score that would not have earned him bronze in any of the last three editions, nor gold at any of the World Championships since the 105 kg division had been introduced in 1998.

In 2015 the IOC began re-testing samples from the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics, using newer, more advanced testing techniques, in an effort to find those who had used performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), but in whom it could not be detected at the time of those Olympics. The 2012 weightlifting competition was markedly affected, causing many of the results to be changed. In all, there were 37 PED disqualifications from the 2012 weightlifting events, with 5 gold medalists and 18 medalists losing their medals, through November 2020.