Li's form relieves Chinese men's weightlifting from pressu

TAI'AN, East China - China' Li Hongli turned the men's 77kg class competition to a solo show at the Asian Weightlifting Championships and his outstanding performance relieved Chinese men's team from the pressure.

Li, 27, hoisted a total of 369kg with 168kg in snatch and 201kg for clean and jerk, which is the best result in the world since the Athens Olympics. "It is an unexpectedly good result, and among all the male lifers, Li is the only one that showed his best," said Chen Wenbin, the coach of the Chinese weightlifting men's team.

Turkey's Taner Sagir continued his dominance of the category in Europe at European Weightlifting Championships earlier this month, with a total of 363kg, 6kg less than Li.

"I am quite satisfied with and relieved by his outstanding performance today," Chen said. "However, for the sake of guaranteeing the gold medal in Beijing, he has to lift a total of 375kg, which requires much harder training from now on," he added.

China has long been powerful in men's 56kg, 62kg, 69kg and 77kg categories. Except Li, other athletes in the previous three divisions all presented dissatisfactory results at the Asian championships.

The Olympic champion Shi Zhiyong, though winning the gold medal, upset everyone by a disappointing total of 327kg, the worst result he ever got in international competitions since he moved up to 69kg class from 62kg.

Qiu Le and Yang Fan shared a total of 315kg in the 62kg category, which was also far less than their best results, while two Championship rookies, Cen Biao and Li Lizhi, even lost the title of 56kg to Vietnam's Hoang Anh Tuan, the silver medalist at Doha Asian Games.

"We take the Championship as a test for our athletes after the winter training camp, which is also a part of our process in selecting the best athletes for 2008 Olympics," Chen said.

"Some athletes are not in their best shapes at present, such as Shi, who seems like having a sort of mental problem when facing the injuries," he said, adding that Shi's dissatisfactory performance mainly resulted from the inadequate training and preparation.

Experts, however, hold a different point of view on Shi's problem. "Shi has never really recovered from his waist injury, and it is simply not a mental problem," said Zhao Qingkui, the consultant of China's weightlifting team.

"The coach should not blame the athletes for making all the mistakes, and I believe every Chinese athlete always spares no effect in training, unless he is afraid of getting hurt again," he added.

Zhao also stressed that the reason why Yang Fan and Qiu Le did not manage to reach better results was that coaches did not adjust their training plans, when both of them were exhausted in the previous competitions.

"All athletes will try their best during every single game, and they are always eager to break their own records," Zhao said, "the problem is they are sometimes just too tired to show their best."