We are living in the Powerlifting Participation Age. Everyone wins, everyone totals, everyone ranks, and everyone can hold a record. Not a "personal record" but an "official" record. Yet, we all bitch about the kids and their participation awards while cross-entering every fucking division we can.
I just pulled a sample entry form and calculated how many first places finishes there could be if we look at all of the divisions and weight classes. In a meet with a 70 lifter cut off, there could be over 66,000 first place finishers. That's just one federation and one event.
I will go out on a limb here and say that each main federation has at least one meet a month, and usually in multiple states. Just off the top of my head, I'd guess and say well over 500,000 people, per state, in one month can say they are a Powerlifting Champion.Here is the kicker: that's over 25 times the number of individual powerlifters who competed in 2017! Ya, read that one again. It’s not a typo and I know I write a lot of them.
We also counted over 100 federations. The 66K divisions we calculated were only in one federation. Would this mean there are 6,600,000 World Records? To put this into perspective, we calculated just over 18,000 total competitive powerlifters in the USA (*excluding high school feds). By those numbers, this would give every lifter in the USA 9,722 first places and 366 world records.
Don’t tell me how you placed, rank or what records you have. Tell me your numbers and where you fall in the open top 50.
NOTE: In a sport where I’d guess close to 300,000 people say they “powerlift”, only around 20k step on a platform. Let your competitive status be what separates you, not some record that never existed before.
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