The Malta weightlifting team participated for the first in the Olympic Games with the presence of Kyle Micallef in the 85kg category, thanks to the support of MOC, IOC and IWF.
It was an amazing experience in Rio both for the athlete himself and his coach. Preparation for this event was very good with Kyle lifting a total of 280 kg during his final preparatory sessions.
During the warming up sessions, immediately prior to the competition, Kyle was in excellent condition. However this was not reflected during the competition event.
This was due to various external factors mainly diet, time zone, psychophysical, expectations from athlete and team, logistic, spectators etc…
Micallef missed all his three tentatives on Snatch, thus he was automatically eliminated from the Clean and Jerk as no total could be reached.
Micallef’s main hurdle was more attributed to the logistic and spectators, something critical in this competition and which is requires certain mental preparation.
This is a phenomenon that happens to many athletes even world champions especially in high level competition. Unfortunately, this situation happened to 1/6 of the athletes in these 2016 Olympics.