When we last heard about Iranian 94kg weightlifter and 2016 Olympic Champion Sohrab Moradi, he was breaking the World Record for the total in his weight class. Now, less than a month later, Moradi is making waves again, this time for a training lift.
Though we’ve seen him go above the clean & jerk World Record in his weight class before, Moradi has once again outdone himself with an absolutely immense 240kg lift — EIGHT kilograms over the current official World Record, which was set by Poland’s Szymon Kolecki in 2000. (Note that Kazakhstani weightlifter Ilya Ilyin temporarily held the World Record, though his results were annulled following positive doping retests from the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games.)
Watch Moradi’s massive lift below.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BagYZzahQOU/
At 29 years old, Moradi isn’t a spring chicken in the weightlifting world, but his success over the past two years shows he’s anything but out of his prime. Indeed, his strength seems to be increasing with each competition.
In the same training session, Moradi made a 230kg clean & jerk look like clockwork:
And his heaviest competition snatch — 185kg — is just three kilograms below one of the longest-standing World Records in men’s weightlifting, held by Akakios Kakiasvilis since 1999:
We’re excited to see what Moradi does on the platform at this year’s World Weightlifting Championships, which is set to kick off in late November in Anaheim, California.
To our knowledge (and assuming he stays health and competes), this will be the first World Championships for Moradi in quite some time, and the first where he looks positioned to take home gold.
With nine countries currently serving suspensions due to positive doping retests, Moradi and the rest of the Iranian squad look poised to make waves on the podium.
