The Justice

Media Credit: Julian Agin-Liebes Dave Almeida '09 has trained hard for national weightlifting competitions. Here, he shows what goes into a lift.

As 26 members of the Brandeis baseball team and staff were arriving in the Orlando International Airport March 7, Dave Almeida '09 was taking a far less glamorous trip-a 15-hour drive from Waltham to a convention center in Columbus, Ohio.

Having made the trip to Florida three times as a former member of the baseball team, Almeida knows what he was missing: pristine fields, warm sunny weather, pearl-white baseballs for batting practice and a solid base tan. But this year, he decided to pass up all of that to make the drive to Columbus alone to compete in the sport that now drives him: Olympic weightlifting.

Olympic weightlifting, also known as competitive weightlifting or Olympic lifting, is an individual sport that divides competitors into weight classes and combines their highest weight total of three attempts in two types of lifts, the snatch and the clean and jerk. Almeida says the level of dedication needed to succeed in the sport is unique.

"I'd say that you have to enjoy beating yourself up if you really want to excel in competitive weightlifting," Almeida says with a smirk on his face.

Since giving up baseball to train and compete full-time as a weightlifter, Almeida has had success, finishing second in New England at regional championships in his weight class last December, but the event he was driving to Columbus for, the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, was his first national meet. "The Arnold," which has a Web site that includes several photos of the California governor himself, features not only weightlifting but everything from martial arts to arm wrestling to race-walking, with well over 150,000 attendees annually.

Even though it was his first national meet, Almeida managed a third-place finish out of 15 competitors in the Open Men's session and notched a new personal record in the snatch, managing to throw 93 kilograms (205 pounds) over his head in one fluid motion before finishing with a total of 211 kilograms on the day, also a personal best.

Almeida's path to the lifting platform was hardly straightforward. The first time he stepped into a weight room as a freshman in high school was when he had no ride home and meandered into the claustrophobic weight room at Fairfield College Preparatory School, near his house in Bridgeport, Conn., as an accident. Almeida started with basic weight training as a way to get stronger and more explosive for baseball.

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