Female Weightlifters

Hidilyn Diaz is a Filipino airwoman and weightlifter. She achieved national fame in 2020, when she became the first Filipino to win an Olympic gold for the Philippines. Hidilyn Diaz earned her first Olympic medal in 2016, when she won a silver medal in Rio de Janeiro. She has also won medals at the World Championships and Asian Championships.

Icelandic weightlifter and CrossFit athlete Sara Sigmundsdóttir was placed 3rd in the CrossFit Games twice. She has also won the 2016 Dubai Fitness Championship and appeared in the documentary Fittest on Earth: A Decade of Fitness. She now works as a trainer at CrossFit Sudurnes in Reykjanesbaer.

Tia-Clair Toomey is an Australian CrossFit Games athlete and weightlifter. As a weightlifter, she won a gold medal for Australia at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Toomey has also won five CrossFit Games Championship titles so far; she won these titles in five successive CrossFit Games starting from 2017.

Olympic gold medalist Li Wenwen is one of the most well-known weightlifters of China. She is also a national champion, an Asian champion, and a world champion. She made headlines when she revealed that she had slept on the floor in the Olympic village in Tokyo, as she found the beds too soft.

Zhou Lulu is one of China’s most well-known weightlifters and competes in the heaviest women’s weightlifting category, the +75kg. By lifting 333kg, she set a world record and won the gold at the 2012 London Olympics. She has also earned World Championship and Asian Games gold medals.

Mihaela Cambei is a Romanian weightlifter who won the bronze medal in the 49 kg category at the 2021 European Championships in Moscow. Cambei is also known for winning three gold medals at the European Youth Championships.

Chinese weightlifter Deng Wei is a 5-time world champion and an Olympic gold medalist. Specializing in clean and jerk and snatch, she has also won an Asian Games silver and an Asian Championship gold. The Chinese selectors stunned everyone by leaving her out of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics team due to injuries.

Kazakh weightlifter Zulfiya Chinshanlo, who won an Olympic bronze in Tokyo, was previously disqualified for failing a doping test and had her gold medal and her world record earned at the 2012 London games revoked. She is also a 3-time world champion. Both Kazakhstan and China claim she is their citizen.

Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka is a German Japanese pianist, composer, and former powerlifter and Olympic weightlifter. She achieved popularity in 1998 when she won a national music competition known as Deutscher Musikwettbewerb, along with her brothers Danjulo and Kiyondo Ishizaka. As a Olympic weightlifter, Kimiko competed at the 2008 German championships where she won three medals.   

Romanian weightlifter Loredana Toma has not just been a World Champion but has also won the European Championship thrice. Though considered a gold aspirant, she could not compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because of the year-long ban imposed on the Weightlifting Federation of Romania for a doping scandal.

Azerbaijani-Romanian weightlifter Cristina Iovu, who competes in 53-kg division, won gold at the European Weightlifting Championships in 2012 and 2016, bronze at the Olympics in 2012 and silver at Universiade in 2013. She was stripped of her Olympic medal after her re-tested 2012 Olympics sample tested positive for Dehydrochlormethyltestosterone. In December 2018, IWF banned her until 2026 for Blood substitution.

Romanian weightlifter Monica Csengeri became a European champion in 2021 and also won a silver at the same contest in 2017. In spite of representing Romania at several international championships, she was banned by the International Weightlifting Federation for a year for testing positive for the stimulant Ephedrine.