Matthias Steiner

This is a post by my friend, Brent. One of his hobbies is to get on YouTube and watch videos of Olympic weightlifting, and he has done so for years (along with eating alone at restaurants, loving techno music, and getting chastised at work for having sweet hair). He has a pretty good knowledge of current weightlifters, and I’ve invited him to weigh in on well known lifters throughout the world.
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Matthias Steiner started competing as an Olympic weightlifter in 1995 for Austria. He was a relatively 70s big athlete from the outset, and rapidly grew into a competitive 105k lifter, and would eventually produce a 405k total at the 2004 Olympics, which ranked him 7th in what was a fairly tight competition. During his career with the Austrian Weightlifting Federation he competed in both the 105k and 105k+ categories.

By 2005, Steiner was unable to keep his bodyweight under the 105k limit and permanently moved to the superheavy category. It was also around this time that he and the Austrian Weightlifting Federation had a falling out, and he applied for citizenship in Germany. He wouldn’t compete for three years while his change in citizenship was pending.

Steiner reappeared on the international scene in 2008, making a strong statement when he won the Beijing Pre-Olympic Tournament with a 423k total. People were already speaking of the promise he held when he made another fantastic improvement in his showing at the 2008 European Championships. He was the only 105k+ lifter to snatch 200k, and made a lifetime PR clean and jerk at 246k in a solid 6 for 6 performance. Only Viktor Scerbatihs bested him by a kilo in total.

It was clear that Steiner would be the dark horse in the 2008 Olympic Games. He would face tough competition against Scerbatihs and the Russian colossus Evegny Chigishev. Steiner missed a crucial third attempt snatch and finished with 203k going into the clean and jerk, trailing behind Scerbatihs and Chigisehv in fourth place. Scerbatihs missed his second clean and jerk at 244k, but Steiner missed his first attempt clean and jerk at 246k before coming back on his second to take 248. Chigishev was successful at 240, 247, and 250k, which, along with his 210k snatch, gave him 460 for the lead.

Scerbatihs and Steiner would determine the medal rankings with their last attempts on the clean and jerk. To take first place, they would both need to take unreasonably large jumps in their attempts, but this was the fucking Olympics. Nobody was playing games, they had all quit school because of recess.

Scerbatihs would make a valiant attempt at 257, but was not able to pull through.

Steiner knew what he needed to do; he needed 461 to win, and he called for 258k on the bar. This would be a 10k increase from his second attempt, and a huge lifetime PR. The clean pinned him for a moment, but he powered out of the hole and set himself for the jerk. As he stuck the shit out of the jerk, the auditorium, which had held their silence during his effort, exploded with cheers and applause for he had produced one of the biggest upsets in weightlifting history.