2018 weightlifting world champion Simon Martirosyan hit a 250 kg jerk in training yesterday and it really didn’t look like a true max effort lift! This is the heaviest jerk we have ever seen from Simon and is 10 kg over his world record clean and jerk of 240 kg.
The heaviest attempt in the jerk that we had ever seen from Simon Martirosyan came from his 246 kg junior +105 kg clean and jerk world record attempt from 2017 where he weighed just 113 kg. It was an attempt to beat Saeid Alihosseini‘s triple world record setting performance from the 2008 Asian Junior Weightlifting Championships.
Having improved a good amount over the last two years it is becoming ever more apparent that we may one day witness a 250 kg clean and jerk from Martirosyan. If he is able to achieve this astonishing feat it will be the first time we have have seen a 250 kg clean and jerk from a non super-heavyweight since Yury Zakharevich hit 250.5 kg in 1988.
The Armenian weightlifting sensation is currently in preparation for the 2019 European Weightlifting Championships and has put in an entry total of 430 kg, 29 kg above his nearest competitor. It seems likely that we will see Simon attempt new world records in both lifts after securing the win on his openers. At the 2018 Weightlifting World Championships Simon was called for a press-out on his 197 kg world record snatch attempt, a lift he likely hopes to secure at these championships.
Bio
Simon Martirosyan, born 17th February 1997, is an -109 kg Armenian weightlifter. As a youth lifter Simon held the youth world records in the snatch, clean and jerk and total in the +94 kg weight class. Aged 17 Simon became the 2014 Youth Summer Olympics champion in the +85 kg class.
Simon received his first senior medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics in the 105 kg class taking silver with a 190/227 kg performance. He went on to win the 2017 Europeans going 184/230 kg, the same year that he won the 2017 Junior World Championships with a spectacular 197/236 kg performance as a light super heavy weight. In 2018 Simon Martirosyan finally became a world champion, defeating China’s Yang Zhe and Uzbekistan’s Ruslan Nurudinov with a dominant 195/240 kg performance, setting his first senior world records in the clean and jerk and total.