David Liti is a Commonwealth Games champion for the second time, and he won it by the smallest margin the sport allows.
The Auckland super heavyweight took gold in the men’s over 110 kilogram class at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games with a combined total of 389 kilograms, one kilogram clear of India’s Lovepreet Singh. It is a Games record total, and it came out of a position that looked lost halfway through the competition.
Liti snatched 166 kilograms, a lift he was not happy with, and it left him a distant second behind Singh, who had put 176 kilograms overhead. Ten kilograms is a large deficit in a two-lift sport. It meant Liti had to find the difference in the clean and jerk, and he had to do it while his rival watched.
What followed was as much tactics as strength. Liti opened his clean and jerk on 220 kilograms and made it, which put the first real pressure on the Indian. His team then nominated 223 kilograms for his next attempt. That number was chosen deliberately. It forced Singh to make 217 kilograms simply to stay level. Singh went for it and failed. Liti walked out and made 223 kilograms at the first time of asking, and the gold medal was decided before the platform had cooled.
Singh finished on 388 kilograms for silver after his own 217 kilogram attempt went down, and England’s Andrew Griffiths took bronze with 356 kilograms. RNZ reported that Liti admitted afterwards he was unhappy with his snatch but believed he could beat his opponent in the clean and jerk. The scoreboard says he read it correctly.
The win completes an unusual set. Liti won gold on the Gold Coast in 2018 with a Games record 403 kilograms, took silver at Birmingham in 2022, and has now returned to the top of the podium in Glasgow. Before the Games, RNZ noted he had the chance to become the first New Zealand weightlifter to win a medal at three separate Commonwealth Games. He has done it, and he has done it with two golds around the silver.
That 2018 win in Australia is still the one most New Zealanders remember, and not only for the lifting. Liti was given the David Dixon Award for sportsmanship at those Games after the way he treated his injured rival Lauititi Lui of Samoa. Writing at the time, Stuff described the 21-year-old’s reaction to that first gold, quoting him saying “I still can’t really get my head around it, it’s indescribable.” He is 30 now, and the reaction in Glasgow was calmer, which is what happens when a man has spent eight years learning how heavy a good day actually is.
Liti has been the constant in a small sport. He was born in Auckland in July 1996 and spent part of his childhood in Tonga. He was found by coach Tina Ball while he was playing rugby, and she has stayed with him through two Olympic campaigns. He finished fifth in Tokyo with 414 kilograms and eighth in Paris with 415 kilograms, results that sit closer to the world’s best than the placings suggest, because the super heavyweight class is where the biggest lifters in the world all end up.
He also carried the New Zealand flag into the opening ceremony in Glasgow on 23 July alongside Moira de Villiers, which made this week a neat piece of symmetry. The athlete who led the team in has now given it one of its best results.
There was a second New Zealand story on the same weightlifting platform. Tuʻi-Alofa Patolo finished fourth in the women’s over 86 kilogram class, missing the podium in a division where New Zealand has been building depth. It follows Cameron McTaggart’s silver in the men’s 88 kilogram class earlier in the week, which was the country’s first medal of these Games away from the pool. Fiji also had a day worth marking, with Taniela Rainibogi taking their first gold of the Games in the 110 kilogram class.
Elsewhere on Friday the news was more mixed for the New Zealand team. Tom Walsh’s bid to become the first man to win three straight Commonwealth shot put titles ended in silver. He led through four rounds after opening on 21.03 metres, then could not find the same throw again, fouling in the third and fourth rounds and sending a fifth-round effort outside the sector and into a television microphone. Nigeria’s Chukwuebuka Enekwechi won with 21.07 metres, four centimetres being the whole story. Nick Palmer was sixth on debut.
Paralympian Anna Grimaldi took bronze in the women’s T47 100 metres, behind Canada’s Sheriauna Haase in 12.23 seconds and Chloe Dunbar in 12.33. That came days after Zoe Hobbs won New Zealand’s first Commonwealth Games 100 metres gold, and on the same stretch of the programme that produced a full set of medals on the opening day of track cycling, including gold for paracyclist Emma Foy and pilot Jessie Hodges in the women’s tandem sprint and for the men’s team pursuit squad.
New Zealand sent 112 athletes to Glasgow across 10 sports for a Games running from 23 July to 2 August. With Sunday’s closing ceremony now close, the team has medals from the pool, the track, the velodrome, the basketball court and the weightlifting platform. Liti’s is the one that turned on a single kilogram and a coach’s nerve.
What did you make of the finish in the over 110 kilogram class, and where does David Liti sit among New Zealand’s Commonwealth Games greats? Leave a comment below and tell us.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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