on the soccer thing: sure, most kids in the world who like to play sports and probably lots that don't grow up loving soccer. but soccer requires a narrow range of body types and a very specific set of athletic characteristics for elite performance. weightlifting requires a very different profile. so it's not like soccer is stealing away all those kids who go on to become hossein rezazedeh.
The narrow range of body types is not really true. In Peter Crouch, Adriano and Lionel Messi you have 6'7 and extremely skinny, 6'2 ~ 200 pounds, and 5'6 and stocky. However, even if it is true you are missing the point. The point is not whether rezazedeh succeeds in soccer but it's whether or not his interest in soccer precludes him from becoming a weightlifter. If you could have been a great bowler but instead became a horrible basketball player, basketball still "stole" you from bowling.
i don't think lifting is a fringe sport in places like bulgaria and greece. anyway, it's less of a fringe sport in those countries than it is here, anyway. it's not fringe in iran, where rezazedeh is a national hero whose wedding was broadcast on state tv.
the us has more than enough athletic people to support a world-class weightlifting team. sure, lots of our top athletes go on to play professional football and that shrinks the pool. but throwing is a fringe sport in this country and we still manage to produce world-class throwers, who are football-player-sized and might otherwise be offensive linemen.
Weightlifting is most definitely a fringe sport in Iran. Rezazedeh is mixed up in politics but that's not a good indicator of whether or not the sport is fringe. If you walk down the street in Tehran with a broomstick and ask 100 young men to perform a clean and jerk with it 99 of them will have no idea what your talking about. However, they can all explain to you the offsides rule in soccer and nowadays a few of them know the basics of basketball. I will give you that *maybe* it's less fringe than it is in the US, but it's fringe just because the vast majority of the population has never had any chance to test their potential in the sport.
Also, do we produce world class throwers? In the Shot, discuss, javelin, and hammer we produced zero mens medals in the world championships. We had one female bronze. I wouldn't say the US is up to it's standards in the throws. Also, remember that while I would also define throwing as fringe it has WAY more exposure to american athletes than weightlifting. Every highschool track team encourage their big kids to go out for track and throw. So if your a big american boy who has the potential to throw it's quite likely it will get discovered. The same is not true for olympic weightlifting.
part of the problem with the "better alternatives" argument is that half of the weightlifters in the olympics are women. last time i checked there's never been a single female football player in the history of the NFL and maybe one or two in high-level college (as kickers). so why do our big girls suck at lifting, too? there has to be something else going on.
i don't know why we suck at olympic lifting, but i suspect it has to do with a combination of
1. lack of interest/availability of more appealing alternatives. that is, basically what everyone has said. more little athletic kids DO end up as gymnasts and more big athletic kids DO end up playing football.
2. several decades of incoherent and often stupid training methodology throughout sports in general and for weightlifting in particular. (this is primarily what the cherniga series is about.)
i'm rambling and not entirely sure that was all coherent. it's an interesting question.
Well bringing women in to this really opens the argument to so so so many other things that I don't have time to get into it right now. Remember though the point is not that the athlete becomes an NFL football player instead of a weightlifter. It's that the athlete focuses on football (and probably fails) rather than becoming a weightlifter. For our big girls it could be as simple as our big girls focus on not wanting to be big girls. Also, women's programs are often extremely underdeveloped in other countries due to sociocultural reasons (one reason why our female soccer team is so good) so the comparison with men really is hard to do. And finally you can't talk about women without talking about drugs. Drugs are 100x more helpful for female competitors than male competitors, so to determine success you have to look at doping regimes as well.
Finally, I understand your point, I just think people really have a tendency to point to the training and totally underestimate how massively important culture is when it comes to a large population. Fact is extremely gifted athletes are very very very rare events. But they happen. You could have had my grandmother train Usain Bolt and he still would have won the 200m at the olympics in 2008. He ran a 20.5 as a incredibly weak fifteen year old kid! Just growing up would have put him under 20 seconds! An athlete that gifted will find success if they have pretty terrible training. The fact is the 300+ million very diverse population of the US will provide an edge in the number of rare event gifted athletes for weightlifting. If we weren't training them right you would see them 1) Putting a huge numbers and then getting injured or 2) Putting up huge numbers in the junior ranks but then never progressing and settling for bronzes and out-of-medal finishes. However, you don't see them at all. Which is evidence that it's not how we train our extremely gifted olympic weightlifters that explains the dearth of american success in the sport but the fact that those born to be extremely gifted olympic weightlifters.... are not weightlifters.
