It feels like just yesterday that Lasha Talakhadze put on a world record setting performance at the 2019 IWF Weightlifting World Championships. Plenty of records fell at the event, but Lasha’s performance was at a completely unique, unprecedented level: he made the heaviest weightlifting total of all time.
His performance earned three gold medals for his 220kg snatch (new World Record), 264kg clean & jerk (new World Record), and that monstrous 484kg total, which beat his own world record by an incredible 6 kilograms.
With that sort of performance, we thought we might not see headlines about Lasha for a little while, but what you’re about to witness now is almost as noteworthy as his other accomplishments.
Hookgrip posted a video of Talakhadze making a clean & jerk of 267kg/588.6lbs while he was training for the 2019 European Weightlifting Championships in Batumi, Georgia. Videographer @doctor_giorgi captured the video of Talakhadze on site, however, the exact filming date of the video has not been disclosed.
This is the heaviest clean & jerk ever caught on film.
What We Know About This Clean & Jerk
As of right now, this is the heaviest clean & jerk to ever be filmed, maybe even the heaviest ever made. It’s in training, of course, so it isn’t official and doesn’t break any record in any way, but if ever a training lift should be taken seriously it’s now.
At the 2019 European Weightlifting Championships in April, Talakhadze won gold with a 218kg snatch, a 260kg clean & jerk, and a 478kg total. His snatch, clean & jerk, and total were then world records before he went on to beat them all at Worlds last month. Here’s our video putting that total into context.
What the training video we’re writing about shows is that Talakhadze hit a clean & jerk seven kilos more than what he ended up lifting at the European Championships. (We can’t help but be curious about the training snatches he might be hiding from us…)
This man cannot be stopped. He now is a four-time World Champion (2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019), a four-time European Champion (2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019), and a 2016 Rio Olympic Champion.
Now that we’ve witnessed Talakhadze crushing a 267kg clean & jerk — in training, yes, but that’s still a darn 267kg clean & jerk — we just hope that as he trains for the 2020 Olympics that an entire video team starts following the guy around. We don’t want to miss anymore of these historic lifts!
Featured image from @talakhadzelasha_official Instagram page.
