At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Olivia Reeves lived in the athletes’ village for three weeks, building anticipation — and nerves — until her competition finally came on the last Friday of the Games.
Now Reeves, the first American to win Olympic weightlifting gold since 2000, is playing a different waiting game.
She has been sidelined from her sport since July due a stress fracture on her L5 vertebrae.
“My first big-kid injury,” Reeves, 23, said while in New York City recently for a USA Weightlifting Foundation fundraising event. “Never in my life have I spent this amount of time — we’re almost at three months — away from a gym or working out or being athletic. Not to say that I’ve done nothing, but not having that outlet or that space to go to regularly, I think has been a little bit of an identity crisis, to say the least.”
Reeves, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, was forced to withdraw from the World Championships in China, which run from Oct. 27-Nov. 8.
She can start lifting again next week and looks forward to competing again in December as Olympic qualifying ramps up.
In the meantime, Reeves tackled projects in the 106-year-old house that she bought in June and shares with her sister, Haley. She is working toward a master’s degree in public health with a focus on chronic disease prevention and control at UT-Chattanooga. She fosters dogs.
She can also reflect on Paris.
Steve Fauer, a licensed pilot, snake seller and Reeves’ coach since she transitioned to weightlifting from CrossFit a decade ago, said his pupil looked more nervous and scared before her first Olympic lift than at any other competition in her life.
Reeves made her first five of six lifts. She set an Olympic record in the new 71kg (156 pounds) weight class in the snatch (117kg or 257 pounds). She clinched gold — with one lift to spare — with a 145kg (319 pounds) clean and jerk.
For her last lift, she went for an Olympic record 150kg in the clean and jerk and missed. While celebrating her gold, she also lamented that final moment, saying “that will haunt me.”
US’ Olivia Reeves competes in the women’s -71kg weightlifting event during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the South Paris Arena in Paris, on August 9, 2024. (Photo by Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP) (Photo by DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)
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Two years later, Reeves doesn’t remember her total weight lifted in Paris (262kg). She does recall that she wasn’t satisfied.
“In a way, yes, because that was a lot of pressure, and that’s not a normal weightlifting meet in that sense,” she said. “So I did perform, but it’s not like that was the best performance ever, world record and all this kind of stuff. It’s not even my favorite performance. It was good, but not my best. Not great. I wouldn’t say my favorite. It’s just the one everybody knows about.”
It’s also relieving when looking ahead to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where Reeves would again play the waiting game — competing on day 13 of 16, should she make the team.
She moved up to 77kg rather than down to 69kg after all of the weight classes were changed post-Paris.
No American lifter earned gold at a home Games since the 1904 St. Louis Olympics — Oscar Osthoff won the all-around dumbbell event in an all-American, three-man field.
“I don’t have to have my best day to win a gold medal — allegedly, in certain contexts,” Reeves said. “I just have to have a good enough day.”
A good enough day doesn’t have to correspond to lifting a certain weight.
“What I’ve been telling myself now, in terms of the injury and just overall perspective on it, is it’s hard to fail when your goal is experience,” Reeves said. “Being able to recognize that this (sport) in and of itself is an experience, and you can take that as an opportunity and a challenge, and not so much like success/failure, especially as you get more into it, or compete more often and put more pressure on yourself.”
NBC Sports’ Keenan Slusher contributed to this report.
