KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 27 (Bernama) -- National weightlifter Mohamad Aniq Kasdan hoped the country can provide a grassroots programme to start off young athletes at age 12 to ensure that the sport has a back-up of second-liners to be groomed into champions.
He thinks weightlifting trainers should get cracking with athletes as young as 12 years old to be trained as back-ups because the sport requires a relatively long period of time on the agility ladder to build a champion.
“Malaysia often has to wait a long time for new weightlifters to appear... In neighbouring countries, they start light training at age 12 already but they maintain it as a hobby to learn techniques. When they reach age 15 or 16, they will get more serious.
“Because techniques are important, we must introduce it into training at that early age when the body is still supple. Once you are a teenager, the body is already stiff. Most lifters in Malaysia start too late, at age 15 to 16, to be able to peak their performance at 22 to 23 years old,” he said during the ‘Ceritera Merdeka’ programme on Bernama Radio at Wisma Bernama here today.
In the meantime, the 22-year-old athlete singled out some promising young lifters who showed excellence at the just-concluded 2024 Malaysia Games (SUKMA XXI) in Sarawak, to the extent that they were able to break the national record as a positive sign for the country’s weightlifting sport.
“At the SUKMA, most broke national records, some almost equalled the gold medal record of the Commonwealth Games. I think that’s a promising sign, maybe after my time they will rise to the occasion,” he said.
At SUKMA 2024, Perlis lifter Muhammad Hafizuddin Roslin managed to steal the spotlight when he broke the national record eight times in the men's 81 kilogramme (kg) category.
The 20-year-old athlete snatched 141 kg, surpassing Nasir Roslan’s record of 140 kg at the 2021 National Weightlifting Championships, before doing two more snatches that erased his record, with 146 kg and then 151 kg.
He then executed the first clean & jerk of 165 kg to break the national record of a total lift of 316 kg to erase Nasir's old record of 315 kg.
Muhammad Hafizuddin then broke the national clean & jerk record in his second attempt with 176 kg before renewing his own record with a lift of 181kg, for a total lift of 332 kg.
The women’s category was no less impressive when Perak’s Qharisya Suffia Mohd Muzani set a new national record in the snatch discipline with a lift of 65 kg, clean & jerk (79 kg) to dominate the podium in the 45-kg category with a total lift of 144 kg.
-- BERNAMA
