Make it a four-peat — and another world record — for CJ Cummings.
Cummings claimed two gold medals and one silver at the IWF Junior World Championships on Monday morning in Suva, Fiji, becoming the first lifter from any nation to win the overall title in his weight class for the fourth consecutive year. Before Cummings’ first junior world championship in 2016, no American weightlifter had won a world title at any level since 2000.
The 18-year-old Beaufort native was a bit shaky in the snatch portion of the competition, hitting a 145kg lift before missing at 148kg and 150kg and settling for silver. He rebounded with a gold medal and junior world record performance in the clean and jerk, hitting 192kg after missing at 185kg on his second attempt. The lift bettered his own junior world record by one kilogram.
“I was kind of mad because (the snatch) wasn’t my best performance,” he told USA Weightlifting after the competition. “I didn’t think about (the clean), just went out there and did it and it was a piece of cake.”
Cummings still has a chance to add two more junior world titles before he ages out of the division, but for now he is trying to secure a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in 2020. His next competition is the Junior Pan American Championships later this month in Havana, Cuba.
“I am extremely happy and excited for this year’s gold medal,” Cummings told Team USA. “My next competition will be the Junior Pan American Championships, which I also would like to win and build up my ROBI points to qualify for the Tokyo Olympic Games.”
