Referees and jury members reviewed a snatch world record for nearly 10 minutes during the Women's 71-kilogram event at the 2025 Asian Weightlifting Championships.
- What Happened: Yang Qiuxia set a 122-kilogram snatch world record in front of her home crowd in Jiangshan, China. International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) technical officials halted the event to determine whether Yang had started her attempt after her clock had run out.
"If there's this much deliberation required, you should rule in favor of the athlete," remarked Weightlifting House commentators Seb Ostrowicz and Sergii Putsoff.
Yang was granted the record after a group of nearly 10 IWF officials had disbanded their cluster around the jury table.
Commentators Ostrowicz and Putsoff continued — "We almost could've crowned a 2028 Olympic Champion by now."
Tune In: How to Watch the 2025 Asian Weightlifting Championships
3 Records, 2 Athletes: 1 Big Day
Once the wheels of time had shaken off the rust and cobwebs and began to spin again, fans in the arena in Jiangshan, China, were treated to another pair of world records.
North Korea's Song Kuk-Hyang, incumbent record holder in the clean & jerk, pushed her own limits a hair higher:
Song Kuk-Hyang (PRK) | 2025 Asian Weightlifting Championships
- Snatch: 121
- Clean & Jerk: 155 | World Record
- Total: 276 | World Record
This marks the first time at this year's Asian Weightlifting Championships that a category had all three of its records reset in the same session — the weight class set to replace the Women's 71s next month has some big shoes to fill.
Women's 71KG | 2025 Asian Weightlifting Championships
Yang and Song stamped the 71-kilogram record books just as it closed. On Jun. 1, the IWF will enact its new batch of weight classes and the 71-kilogram records will be resigned to history. They are:
Women's 71KG World Records
- Snatch: 122 | Yang Qiuxia (CHN)
- Clean & Jerk: 155 | Song Kuk-Hyang (PRK)
- Total: 276 | Song Kuk-Hyang (PRK)
The upcoming 69-kilogram category will likely serve as refuge for athletes in this division. What's more, the 69s have already been a Women's division between 1998 and 2018. When it was retired, the records stood at:
Women's 69KG (1998-2018) World Records
- Snatch: 123 | Oxana Slivenko (RUS)
- Clean & Jerk: 157 | Zarema Kasaeva (RUS)
- Total: 276 | Oxana Slivenko (RUS)
These records were set by Russian weightlifters Slivenko and Kasaeva between 2005 and 2007 — they stood for over a decade without contest.
More recently, the Women's 71-kilogram snatch record in particular has been a hot potato since 2022 when the category was validated as an event at the Paris Olympics.
Once confirmed, the world's best swarmed the class and started a yearly record rotation:
- 2022: 119 | Loredana Toma (ROU)
- 2023: 120 | Liao Guifang (CHN)
- 2024: 121 | Angie Palacios Dajomes (ECU)
- 2025: 122 | Yang Qiuxia (CHN)
If you're a fan of weightlifting, this is a major buy signal. Incremental record advancement by different athletes from regions all over the world makes the sport a thrill to watch — as long as we're watching it live, not at the jury table.
Watch the athletes try to squeeze into their own record books in the final days of the Asian Weightlifting Championships on Weightlifting House TV.
