The Body Olympic: Watching the London Games : The New Yorker

The Body Olympic: Watching the London Games : The New Yorker: It was the broad, conspiratorial smile of a pixie who has just worked out how to pick up the big bad wolf and throw him out of the wood, and it drove home what an excellent sport—for lucky Olympians, at any rate—weightlifting is. Unregarded, underfunded, defiantly unglamorous, these people toil away, sometimes in countries where the discipline is worshipped, like Turkey, but more often in quieter nooks of the world; and then, every four years, their moment of jerkness arrives. And, when it does, it seems perfect: speedy, compact, unassailably dramatic, and laudably basic—almost pre-Homeric—in its simplicity. Who can pick up a bigger pair of rocks?