While the weightlifting world is preparing for the Weightlifting World Championships to kick off in California this week, the IWF is also preparing for next year’s Championships.
In a press release published today on IWF.net, the International Weightlifting Federation has announced that the 2018 IWF World Championships will be held in Ashgabat, the capital city of Turkmenistan.
It was originally announced over two years ago that the contest would be held in Lima, Peru. There isn’t a lot of detail as to why the change took place — the press release states,
…the original host of the 2018 World Championships renounced the organization enabling the Executive Board to reallocate it to Turkmenistan.
In an interview with insidethegames.biz, an IWF spokesperson said that Peru relinquished its role as host “to support the sport’s family” and added,
It’s not really about Peru, there’s no reason. It has happened in the past where for different reasons the organisers said ‘we can’t organise that’, but it’s not the case [in this instance].
It’s true that changes in venue aren’t unheard of. Last month, the 2018 IWF Junior World Weightlifting Championships moved from North Korea to Uzbekistan, and even this year’s World Championships were originally slated to be held in Penang, Malaysia, until the city “encountered difficulties and resigned from (organizing) the event.”
The IWF says that part of the reason they landed on Ashgabat as the venue for next year’s championships was that they successfully hosted the 2017 Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games in September, and weightlifters will be able to enjoy “state-of-the-art venues and facilities” that were constructed for that event.
The 2018 IWF World Championships will be held from November 24th to December 3rd, and the 2019 World Championships will be held in Pattaya, Thailand.
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Featured image via the International Weightlifting Federation on Instagram.
