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Pulling Her Weight - The South Magazine |
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The South Magazine
August / September 2008
Pulling Her Weight
By David Gignilliat
 Olympic
weightlifting is an elegant yet violent sport. Its quick, aggressive
bursts test the outermost limits of the human body. A complex
discipline that can easily take a lifetime to master, its explosive
lifts take just a few seconds to execute. To watch Olympic weightlifter
Cheryl Haworth use every inch
of her 5’9, 300-pound frame to thrust massive disks of iron above her
head is beyond impressive; it’s a feat that seems to transcend physics
and defy convention. Country strong, built like a live oak, she is all
trunk and branches moving toward a common goal—winning a medal.
Haworth
is already a legend in American women’s weightlifting, a sport that was
only just introduced into Olympic competition during the 2000 Games in
Sydney. She holds every major junior and American record in her weight
class (and has so for a long time), and has been ranked number one
among all American female lifters for nine consecutive years. She is
the 10-time defending national champion for her country, and in most of
the national competitions, her nearest competitors barely come close. A
prodigy since the first day she ever picked up a barbell, she proudly
wears the title of “America’s Strongest Woman.”
“Cheryl is
just an extremely gifted athlete, one of the best I’ve seen in any
sport,” says Don McCauley, Haworth’s coach at Coastal Empire
Weightlifting.
This August, the Savannah native heads to
Beijing in an excellent position to not only medal, but to compete for
the gold. She picked up a bronze in Sydney and, despite serious injury,
placed sixth at the 2004 Games in Athens. In Beijing, Haworth’s
stiffest competition will likely come from the host Chinese team—a
juggernaut that includes all three current world record-holders (in the
“Clean and Jerk,” “Snatch” and combined—all of which are weightlifting
events), including Tang Gonghong, a gold medalist from the 2004 Athens
Olympics.
“I know exactly who I’m going to be competing
against, so I don’t think I’m going to be surprised by anybody’s
presence, but I feel very strongly that they’ll be surprised by mine,”
says Haworth, who snared her bronze as a 17-year-old wunderkind.
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