After a Rio Games that saw him set a new World Record snatch but finish with a disappointing bomb out in the clean & jerk, 2012 Olympic Champion Behdad Salimi is hardly done with competing — and a video posted to Instagram suggests he’s aiming for even higher numbers.
To be fair, we’re not sure exactly when this video was taken, and it could very well be an older video, perhaps from pre-Rio training. But no matter when it was filmed, Salimi’s 220kg (!) snatch is the heaviest ever lifted from the ground and caught on camera.
Russia’s Aleksey Lovchev has hit 220kg in the snatch off the blocks, and we’ve never seen anyone hit this without straps. But Salimi’s lift — don’t worry if it takes you a second to add up the plates, it did for us, too — is closest anyone has come to the mythical 500 pound mark in the full lift.
It’s an exciting time for international superheavyweight competition. In Rio, Georgia’s Lasha Talakhadze took home gold with an all-time record total (and briefly held the snatch world record himself before it was reclaimed by Salimi). Salimi was competing coming off a knee injury, and while his jerk caused him problems in Brazil, his snatch is on par with the best of all time. We’re hoping to see more battles between Talakhadze and Salimi at World Championships (and perhaps even Olympic Games) to come.
But there’s more going on in the weight class than those two record holders. At just 21 years old, Armenia’s Gor Minasyan has snatched 210kg in competition and looks like he still has room for improvement. And that’s not to mention Russian superheavies like 2-time World Champion Ruslan Albegov, who was prevented from competing in Rio by the general ban on Russian lifters. Will he come back in full form once his country’s suspension is done late next year?