Abstract
When competitive weightlifters tie — a fairly frequent occurrence at the international level — the higher final rank is awarded to the lifter with the lower official bodyweight. Since winning a tiebreaker is more beneficial at higher ordinal ranks, tournament theory suggests a negative relationship between ability and bodyweight. Analysis from 58 Olympic tournaments shows evidence of a significantly negative relationship between ability and bodyweight except in heavier weight-classes. Cross-class differences in bodyweight reduction among high-ability lifters appear to be primarily attributable to cross-class differences in the expected benefits of bodyweight reduction.
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Notes
1. The author contacted a representative of USA Wrestling, who wrote via e-mail regarding the rules of international wrestling: “There is an obscure rule internationally used when all criteria is [sic] the same that states the lightest wrestler will place higher. This is so seldom needed that no one is concerned who is lighter at weigh-ins.”
2. According to the bylaws of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), national weightlifting federations file their athletes' entry forms no later than 14 days before a given competition begins (bylaw 4.3.4). Officials delegate lifters to Groups after the final entries are verified (4.3.7). The IWF rules and bylaws are available at http://www.iwf.net/sport/con_rul.html.
3. Winning a bronze came as such a surprise to that Group B lifter, Pekka Niemi of Finland (1984 Olympics, 100 kg weight-class), that he missed the medals ceremony. He had skipped the Group A session to watch track and field events as a spectator. Niemi was awarded his medal at his own special ceremony the day after the gold and silver were awarded [Wallechinsky 2000].
4. Increments of smaller than 2.5 kg are permitted when a competitor is attempting to break an Olympic or world record.
5. Clean-and-jerk scores are higher than snatch scores. The average competitor in the data set (which will be discussed more thoroughly in the next section) who completed both lift types had a clean-and-jerk score 23.6 percent higher than his snatch score, and none had clean-and-jerk scores lower than their snatch scores.
6. Until 1972, there was a third type of lift, the “press,” which preceded the snatch in the competition. It involved the weightlifter taking the bar from the ground to his shoulders and then raising it above his head using only his arm strength.
7. Appendix Table A1 contains summary information regarding all ties in the data set that affected medals.
8. Women's weightlifting, which was introduced as an official sport in the 2000 Olympics, is not included in this data set.
9. Web addresses are: Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles: www.aafla.org; International Weightlifting Federation: www.iwf.net; Official 2004 Athens Olympics: www.athens2004.com.
10. One of these two lifters did not make weight and was disqualified. The other lifter's weight was clearly erroneously recorded. Dean Willey of Great Britain placed fourth in the 1984 67.5 kg tournament, yet his official bodyweight of 67.85 kg is 350 g over the maximum weight allowed. Results in this paper are robust to specifications including Willey's weight of 67.85 and when adjusting his weight to 67.35, a number chosen because of its visual similarity to 67.85.
11. So severe is weightlifting's reputation that Olympic officials have considered dropping it from the Olympic Games altogether [Janofsky 1988]. For an entertaining read on the controversies surrounding Olympic weightlifting, see Ryan [2000].
12. Ehrenberg and Bognanno [1990a] show that cash prizes in PGA competitions correspond with this rule.
13. Controlling for year with fixed effects also captures time differences in the quality of Olympic competitions. For example, the 1984 Olympics did not feature the world's best weightlifters, since the Soviet-bloc boycott led to the absence of all 10 defending world champions [Moffitt 1984].
14. The bias may actually be negative. Although heavier lifters have incentives to attempt heavier lifts, their probability of successfully completing these lifts will be lower. Suppose with one lift to go lifterZ is in second place with a higher bodyweight and lower lift total, by 2.5 kg, than lifter Y. To improve his ordinal ranking, Z will have to raise his lift total by 5 kg, 2.5 kg more than he would need to were his bodyweight lower than Y's. Success in completing the heavier necessary lift would increase the overall correlation between bodyweight and lift total, but failure would decrease the overall correlation.
15. Estimating equation (3) on the total population of Group B and C lifters does not yield substantially different results than estimating it on Group B lifters only.
16. The t-statistic for the difference between Group B elasticities for the lightest third and the heaviest third is 4.68. For the difference between the middle third and heaviest third it is 3.43.
17. In 1992, head coach Vassiliy Alexeev of the Unified Team of Former Soviet Republics prevented Altymurat Orazdurdiyev of Turkmenistan from competing in the 82.5 kg competition, allegedly because he did not want Orazdurdiyev to outperform the ethnically Russian Ibragim Samadov [Millward 1992]. See also Appendix Table A1.
18. The first five Bulgarian weightlifters in the 1988 Seoul Olympics all medaled, but two tested positive for banned masking agents and were disqualified. Afterwards, the entire Bulgarian team abruptly left Seoul with five competitions to go [Wallechinsky 2000]. In 2000, both the Bulgarian and Romanian teams were expelled by the IWF after multiple weightlifters tested positive for banned substances. Romania was permitted to re-enter its eligible lifters after paying a fine, but the Bulgarian team was not [Longman 2000].
19. Group A lifters in competitions that include a Group C may be a more select group than those in which there is no Group C. I thus estimated equation (3) adding an interaction between Group A membership and a dummy variable equal to 1 if the competition included a Group C. The interaction coefficient is never significant and has very large standard errors in all six estimations. It also has little impact on the signs and significances shown in Table 3.
20. Regressing the log difference between bodyweight ceiling and lifter bodyweight on dummies that represent thirds of weight-classes while controlling for year fixed effects shows that: (1) bodyweights in middle weight-classes are under their ceilings by a significantly higher percentage than bodyweights in lighter weight-classes; and (2) bodyweights in heavy weight-classes are under their ceilings by a significantly higher percentage than bodyweights in middle weight-classes.
21. To test this, I separated the entire sample into six categories, representing Groups A and B for each third of weight-classes. For each category I regress log bodyweight on competition (class × year) fixed effects. The two residual variances (printed here after multiplying by 1,000) in the lightest third are actually quite similar — 0.0237 for Group B and 0.0203 for Group A. In the middle third, the Group B variance (0.0970) exceeds the Group A variance (0.0307), and in the heaviest third, the Group B variance is much higher (0.2897 to 0.1483).
22. Omitting year fixed effects does not substantially affect results in either Column 1 or Column 2.
23. Results are similar when I use coefficient of variation as the dependent variable.
24. Appendix Table A2 contains a complete breakdown of the data set's medals by country, excluding the boycotted 1984 Games.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Paul Cichello, and John Burger for comments on earlier drafts and to David Wallechinsky for discussing data availability with me. All errors are my own.
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Nutting, A. To the Slimmer Go the Spoils: Heterogeneous Responses to Bodyweight Incentives in Olympic Weightlifting Tournaments. Eastern Econ J 34, 375–389 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eej.9050039
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eej.9050039