A lighter load: After Olympic disappointment, CJ Cummings raises bar

It was just the other day that CJ Cummings found himself staring at a results sheet from weightlifting’s Junior World Championships, even though he’d been there less than two weeks earlier.

“I’m like, ‘Who is this 69-kilo(gram) champion?’ ” the Beaufort teen said. “Sometimes I forget it’s me.”

It’s fair to say the first American in 16 years to win a world weightlifting title — the first in a generation to break a world record — is still getting his head around the idea. Heck, the sport’s own global hierarchy might be doing the same.

Like many teens, Cummings is still learning about the guy staring back in the mirror.

That can work both ways. There was the anxiety that led up to May’s U.S. Olympic Trials, when his form was off and the youngest lifter in the competition fell short of the finalist list to compete for the one spot reserved for a U.S. lifter in Rio de Janeiro.

Seven weeks later, Cummings was winning medals on the other side of the globe. He came home from Tbilisi, Georgia, with world youth records in the clean and jerk — actually breaking it twice on consecutive lifts — and for combined weight that factors in the snatch lift.

Cummings had the victory sewn up before taking his final lift of the night.

“I was getting ready for my third (clean and jerk) attempt,” he recalled, “and my coach came back and said, ‘You won.’ I was like, for real? That was a huge surprise.”

Then Cummings went out and lifted 180 kilograms — about 396 pounds — to break the record he’d established earlier in the evening.

“I was just in my zone and doing my own thing,” Cummings said.

His coach, Ray Jones, saw it with a slightly different perspective.

“The pressure came off,” he said. “That was the whole thing.”

It’s tough enough to raise a bar of nearly 400 pounds above your head. It’s even tougher to do it with the weight of expectation hanging off your shoulders.

The buildup started after last November’s world championships when Cummings, then 15, got a last-minute entry and finished 30th against a field of 45 of the world’s best in his weight class. With the Olympics a year away, the spotlight came on.

“All the way up to then, he’d been having fun and doing all these things,” Jones said. “Then it gets to where he’s doing really big things, so ‘I’d better think more.’ And the thinking is not what you want. He’s got that sort of worked out now, we hope.”

Cummings, for his part, isn’t quite sure what to make of the pressure. On one hand, he said the intensity at the Trials wasn’t as much as he expected. And indeed, he nearly set a personal best with a clean and jerk of 178kg that he got over his head but couldn’t hold.

Then again, he acknowledged having a couple of subpar performances leading up to Salt Lake City. And that he was far more relaxed when he got to the platform in Tbilisi.

“I was a lot more confident in Tbilisi than I was in Salt Lake City,” he said. “I was loose and didn’t have anything on my shoulders. I could just go out there and lift.”

Cummings successfully made all six lifts — competitors get three in each discipline — for the first time in several months. He also set a personal best with 137kg (301 pounds) in the snatch, then blew away the field in the clean and jerk.

“That was neat to see,” Jones said.

Cummings became the first American to break a world youth record, and the first in 22 years to break a world record of any sort. In 1994, Robin Byrd-Goad put her name in the record book at the junior level — one stage above youth.

The last male American to break a world record was Artie Dreschler, also at the junior level, back in 1970.

Whatever disappointment might have come out of the Olympic Trials didn’t last long.

“There was motivation,” said Cummings, who doesn’t seem bothered by the four-year wait until he can try to qualify for the 2020 Games in Tokyo.

“It gives me the opportunity to better myself and get better prepared for the next Olympic Trials and the next Olympics. All I’ve got to do is stay focused, stay healthy, and I’ll get my chance.”

Depending on the Trials date, Cummings may still be a teenager when the next opportunity rolls around.

For now, Cummings gets to bask a little in his accomplishments. He was surprised by some 50 friends and relatives who greeted him at Savannah International Airport upon his return from Europe. Soon after came a trip to Boston to spend a few days at Reebok headquarters.

“I’m sure they’re tickled pink with the performance he had there,” Jones said.

School starts next month, where Cummings will be a junior at Beaufort High. His next competition comes in October, when he surely will be a headliner at the Youth World Championships in Malaysia for lifters 17 and under.

“So I’ll go there and try to break more records,” Cummings said. “Try to increase my personal bests.”

At this stage of his career, one essentially equates to the other. Olympics or no Olympics, it’s a nice place to be.

“Now you have CJ with the unbelievable gift that he has to do what he’s doing,” Jones said. “It’s pretty scary (to think) what he can do.”

This story was originally published July 9, 2016 at 4:35 PM with the headline "A lighter load: After Olympic disappointment, CJ Cummings raises bar."