One of the United States’ most promising young weightlifters, Harrison Maurus, is getting better every day. The 17-year-old athlete made a pretty significant personal record over the weekend, cleaning 200 kilograms (441 pounds) and very nearly completing the jerk at around 80kg (176.4lb) bodyweight.
The clip below starts with a 195-kilogram clean & jerk and ends with the 200-kilo lift.
He wrote on Instagram,
Good couple of days demo’ing at the Baltimore Open. I hit a easy 195 CJ and hit a 5kg clean PR at 200. Barely missed the jerk at 200. Also hit a 145 SN yesterday. So an impromptu 340 total over 2 days!
We’ve never seen Maurus clean & jerk more than 195 kilograms, a PR he set back in November before competing at the World Weightlifting Championships in Anaheim.
Note that this training lift above was two kilograms heavier than the lift he later made at the WWC, but that 193kg lift was still heavy enough to set a new youth world record.
Maurus is in the midst of an extraordinarily productive training cycle and his been breaking PRs left and right. He may not have improved his 1-rep maxes in the Olympic lifts, but over the last month he’s hit a front squat PR of 200kg (441lb) for 9 reps, a back squat PR of 240kg (529lb) for 5 reps, a new clean & jerk triple PR of 185kg (407.8lb), and this clean & jerk double PR of 190 kilograms (418.9lb).
And all these PRs happened in less than three weeks.
We should point out that we understand Maurus is planning to change weight classes to compete as an -85kg athlete — we believe he’s currently around 81kg — so these training lifts don’t necessarily mean that he’s coming to break his old -77kg records at his next competition. Regardless, we think it’s pretty safe to say that Harrison Maurus has a 200kg clean & jerk in the bag in the near future. Watch this space.
Featured image via @harrison_maurus on Instagram.