This Canadian just made Olympic weightlifting history. But can the sport be lifted from the brink of disaster?

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This article was published 01/08/2021 (1527 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It took roughly two feet of barbell movement, from the top of her chest straight over her head, for Maude Charron to realize she’d likely just won a gold medal for Canada.

After steadying herself during a successful clean-and-jerk movement in Tokyo this past week, Charron let out a joyous shout as the 288-pound barbell towered over her, the knurling seemingly cemented into her hands.

The other thing on the stage hanging over the Quebec athlete in that moment, aside from the massive amount of weight she had just hoisted, was a legacy — one built by the Canadian women who had come before her, in a sport that has been marred by scandal.

“It was due to Canada for some time,” the 28-year-old Charron told media after her showing at the Tokyo Olympics. “With Christine Girard and stuff, I was thinking a lot about her in the back, so I think it’s just a medal due to us.”

It was a moment of celebration for Canada’s weightlifting community and for comrades such as Girard, who was cheated out of her own gold medal in 2012.

But a dark shadow remains over the sport and its Olympic future. The committee that governs the Games is considering axing weightlifting entirely.

Weightlifting is one of the original Olympic sports, introduced in 1896 in Athens where the one and two-handed lifting events were held outdoors. But the International Weightlifting Federation has faced allegations of widespread doping, financial irregularities, leadership issues and coverups.

In February, the IOC called the situation “increasingly serious” after it said the IWF didn’t follow its anti-doping advice.

It appears that, just as Canadian women are making significant waves in the sport, it may be on its way out.

During an interview with the Star, Girard, the first woman to medal in Olympic weightlifting for Canada, said the past week has brought with it “a lot of emotion.”

In 2018, Girard received a gold medal in weightlifting six years after she competed at the London Olympics.

She was awarded the medal in the 63-kilogram category after Kazakhstan’s Maiya Maneza and Russia’s Svetlana Tzarukaeva retroactively tested positive for a banned substance. Girard also received a bronze medal in 2016 for weightlifting at the 2008 Beijing games after silver medallist Irina Mekrassova of Kazakhstan failed a retest.

But Charron’s win was “proof that we’re on the right path,” said Girard, now 36, who has become a dedicated advocate for clean weightlifting.

“Maude made it all worth it this week,” she said.

The International Olympic Committee has been warning the International Weightlifting Federation that it needs to clean up the sport and deal with doping.

Prior to the games, the IOC reduced athlete entries from 260 to 196 in Tokyo for weightlifting. From the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games, there were more than 50 positive drug tests found retroactively in weightlifters.

The anti-doping process in Tokyo was taken up by the independent International Testing Agency, away from the International Weightlifting Federation, which had faced allegations that it couldn’t to do the job effectively.

When asked about the future this week, an IOC spokesperson told the Star in an email that “Our teams would not be available for interview opportunities on this topic until the conclusion of the weightlifting competition” in Tokyo.

For Girard, keeping the sport in the Olympics is crucial.

“I believe that most sports that get away from the Olympics kind of disappear,” she said.

“It would be really sad,” she added. “It’s such an old sport.”

Girard noted that the signs this year are promising.

“I felt like a lot of the athletes were healthy compared to when I was competing, which was not always the case,” said Girard.

It used to be common when she was lifting at that level to see women in the sport with “a lot of pimples” and “a deep voice,” she said.

But this year, “I saw athletes that look more healthy,” she said, “which I think is because there’s less doping.”

Jeane Lassen, a former Olympian weightlifter from Whitehorse, Yukon, and past member of Girard’s coaching team, started adding pounds to the bar when she was 12 years old. In the 1990s, even though women’s weightlifting wouldn’t be part of the Olympic Games until 2000, Lassen knew she wanted to compete. She eventually got her chance at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Lassen remembers when people used to say, “Oh, no, a woman will never lift their own body weight.”

“All of these kind of glass ceilings keep getting broken, and they’ve been shattered over and over again,” she said.

Over the years, there’s been a strong reputation built-up around women’s weightlifting in Canada.

“Canadian women are good,” Lassen said, adding that there’s a culture of “high expectations.”

A point of pride for her is that there’s a culture established around Olympic weightlifters in Canada to do it clean. But in other countries, she stresses, weightlifting athletes are sometimes “living very different realities.”

Sometimes they have to train in the dirt with vehicle axles and concrete, said Lassen. “There’s all sorts of things that other athletes are living and that might be what makes it that taking drugs doesn’t feel like a wrong thing, because they have all these other things going against them.”

Often, it’s also not up to the athlete whether they dope or not, she said. There are usually systemic or cultural pressures to do so, said Lassen.

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She also urged people to judge Charron’s accomplishment in and of itself. Charron didn’t just win gold because there were no cheaters there to beat her to it, said Lassen. “There is no drug you can take to be mentally capable of doing what she did,” she added.

Lassen hopes young women interested in weightlifting continue to be inspired by Olympians such as Charron and Girard, and that the next tournament includes the sport.

“What Christine and then now Maude have done is like, really, next level,” she said. “There’s a lot of women that are watching going like, ‘Wow, like, that’s what we dreamed of happening one day,’ and it’s so cool that it has.”

With files from The Canadian Press and the Associated Press

Kieran Leavitt is an Edmonton-based political reporter for the Toronto Star. Follow him on Twitter: @kieranleavitt