BEIJING (Times Online) -- Avoid heavy and stressful activity. That's what the doctors told Hossein Rezazadeh, the super-heavyweight weightlifter from Iran, a double Olympic champion, a giant prone to hollered prayers during the anxieties of competition. Heavy and stressful activity probably includes contesting an Olympic final, so he called it a day a month before the Games started. Suddenly the rest had a chance.

This is an event that is almost unbearably emotional, in which contestants cram years of intensity into a brief, hour-long drama. And Matthias Steiner, of Germany, played out the great drama of his life Tuesday, seizing an opportunity to lift the world above his head and then to sob his heart out for his dead wife, Susann, standing on the stage with her picture in one hand and his gold medal in the other.
She died in a car crash a year ago and since that terrible day Steiner has flung himself into his sport as if it was the only thing that could ever make life bearable. He has bulked up, abandoning all thoughts of staying in the sub-105kg category, moving up to the class in which there is no limit, in which the contestants take the stage with great, wobbling, pregnant bellies. No jockey-style wasting for them, the muscle is hidden away beneath a thick coat of warming fat.
Steiner put on a good six stones. He marched into the competition weighing 145kg, almost 23 stones. This is one of the oddest of all sports. The athletes seem to emerge, like trolls, from dark caves and come blinking into the bright lights of the competition venue to make just six lifts, perhaps five minutes in total stage time, all this to mark the work of the past four years, or, if you prefer, a lifetime.
Steiner is not one of those emotional lifters. He is one of the very emotional lifters. Roaring like an enraged bull, he got his snatch total, the first phase of competition, up to 203kg, but that left him some way down the field. Once they got rid of the South Korean, the surviving six were from the same corner of the earth: mostly Slavs and Balts with big, pale faces, eyes lost in the broad expanse of surrounding flesh.
The champion is not quite from this heartland. He is an Austrian who turned German after a row with his national federation. And so the competition unwound its drama. There is an element of poker in weightlifting: you declare the weight you will take, and then you amend it, throwing bluffs and dummies at your opponents. But there is one overriding principle - you can never go back. The weight on the bar can only ever go up. Thus the essential rule of competitive weightlifting is: know thyself.
It came down to three in the end, a Latvian, a Russian and the neo-Austrian. Viktors Scerbatihs, of Latvia, put down the marker and claimed the lead. Steiner added a weight, then declined it. So Evgeny Chigishev, of Russia, raised it up to the weight that would guarantee the lead and, with a titanic effort, did the job. One lift left in the competition, one lifter to make it. Steiner raised again, this time to the weight that would win the competition. Now all he had to do was lift it.
Ah, these moments in sport. How they get to you. How you never tire of them. The hush, the cheers, the renewed hush. Then the effort and the grunt and the groan, and the roars from the crowd; the first phase of the lift now complete. All - all! - he had to do was to raise 258kg above his head (say, a couple of meaty prop forwards). And the crowd united in a great surge of will, and the huge round weights began to rise, and then the knees locked and the elbows locked, and the three white lights were lit, and at the last, a thump as the weight hit the stage.
After that, there was a preposterous great man dancing like a child in wild, uncoordinated glee, while tears rolled in great manly gushes down his enormous face. Happiness and sadness are never all that far apart, we weep buckets for both, and Steiner was clearly unsure whether it was joy or grief that had overwhelmed him. But it was both, for a small miracle had taken place. Steiner had lifted the weight of the world from his shoulders; if only for a night.
Sychronised swimming is a serious business
Let's get this clear right from the start: I have absolutely no intention whatsoever of making synchronized swimming look funny. That would be like me trying to make Monty Python look funny. The only proper attitude is a decent respect. There are some things in life that are beyond improvement and beyond comment, and synchronized swimming is one of them.
Can we get serious about synchronized swimming? We already have. There have been no Great Britain contestants since 1992, and there has never been a Britain synchro medal. But since the Athens Games of 2004, Britain has invested £1.6million in the sport.
This is for overall development, with an eye to the London Games of 2012, but the Britain pair of Jenna Randall and Olivia Allison in Beijing are the most obvious examples of what the money has bought.
There will be more money to spend on the sport - see how uncompromisingly I type the word - over the next four years, and the performance of Randall and Allison will certainly have an influence. There are medals at stake in all sports, and when you look at the table, a medal in synchro counts just the same as a medal in cycling or rowing or athletics. No one will laugh if a single medal makes the difference between beating - to take a completely random example - Australia, even if that medal was won in water-resistant make-up. There's still a way to go, mind. Randall and Allison swam their guts out and smiled their best, finishing thirteenth in Tuesday's preliminaries and failing to make the final.
How silly is the sport? How silly is any sport? Does sport have objective correlatives for silliness? Or is the case that if one sport is silly, all sports are silly? The previous day I watched Yelena Isinbayeva soar to a world record in the pole vault and it was utterly majestic. But is there anything particularly sensible about jumping about on a stick?
Me, I think golf is silly. My loss, as I have been told many times. I tend to think that golf is sillier than synchro, and certainly all golfers, including the pros, would be a great deal fitter if they gave up and dived into synchro instead. A few hours' daily practice of figures and transition elements would do wonders for them all. Never mind the mashies and the niblicks, get to work on the dolphin, reverse scoop, barrel and canoe sculls. That would improve strength, endurance and flexibility no end; not to mention endurance breath control.
And you don't even have to wear a nose clip. Christina Jones, of the United States, doesn't: “It was really hard for me to swim and breathe with it. I have a little trick. I plug my nose with my upper lip. More people are doing it. The other thing that inspired me to go without was my new nose-ring.” Go on, try it. It's not easy, is it? You have to take the sport seriously now.