Team USA took home five medals from Peru, punctuated by Sarah Robles winning the gold medal in the (+87kg category) and becoming the first American woman to become champion at the Pan American Games since 2003.
Half of the team of 10 that participated in Lima ended up on the podium.
Harrison Maurus attained Team USA’s 1st medal in Lima on Sunday with a bronze in the men’s (81kg category).
The showing in Lima far exceeds the 2 medals won in the last Pan American Games in 2015 and is the fruition of years-long rebuild in how USA Weightlifting operates.
Pointing to the depth of the US team, Pan American champions Alyssa Ritchey, CJ Cummings, Jenny Arthur, and Caine Wilkes did not make the trip to Lima.Nye applauded: “the changes in weightlifting domestically, such as changing the culture, creating a support performance culture, growing the sport” The chief executive officer of USA Weightlifting Phil Andrews told: “We’ve gone from frankly a definite zero in a lot of ways... our governance, our culture, our achievement on the international platform, financially to a degree, membership to a degree, certainly in the way we treated our customers, our members, our athletes, our coaches... and completely turned it around,” He says the journey began with a reformation of the bylaws in 2009.
In 2016 came the reformation of “how we did almost everything” from the selection of teams to the business model.