The Catalan woman who breaks stereotypes: "Oh, Maria, when I see you lifting so much weight, I get scared"

TorellóSometimes, if they have a meal, her friends tell her to carry the bags. "They tell me: 'You carry this, you are stronger'," admits Maria Olalla (Vilanova i la Geltrú, 2005). This Sunday she will compete in the Weightlifting World Championship in the Chinese city of Ningbo. Last year she was a European junior runner-up and now she comes from being a European under-23 runner-up. Her record is 95 kilos in snatch and 220 kilos in clean and jerk. She shines in a sport she discovered four days ago. Weightlifting was so popular in the second half of the last century that even Real Madrid managed to have a section and more than 10,000 licenses were exceeded in the country as a whole (1991). Afterwards, it dropped suddenly and stabilized around 2,000, but now it is experiencing a second youth.

Olalla started by doing artistic gymnastics, but she quit as a teenager: "I was burning out a lot because it was very demanding and very sacrificial and I already saw that I wouldn't get anywhere. I felt it wasn't worth it". Then she started playing volleyball at high school and signed up for a gym. "I did machines and some abs class or something like that, nothing more. My brother was taking CrossFit classes and kept insisting that I try it until one day I said yes to make him happy", she smiles.

She takes a breath and continues the story: "I took my first class at the end of 2020 and I loved it. I liked it so much that I wanted to go every day. The classes were an hour long and since that wasn't enough for me, I started doing a parallel program. One day they asked me if I wanted to go to a weightlifting competition and it went quite well for me". It was the first weightlifting competition she had ever seen in her life. "It was March 2022. Back then, I only knew the name of the sport, weightlifting, and the figure of Lydia Valentín, as a sports fan", Olalla adds. Her first coach was Marcos Ruiz, another Catalan lifter who in 2024 was a world gold medalist in the snatch and bronze in the overall classification. He will not compete in China due to injury.

Olalla did not fully dedicate herself to weightlifting until August 2023, just over three years ago. At the beginning, she also had to face the weight of stereotypes. She remembers being told that she would develop a man's body. "When I started, it was a bit strange. It wasn't the norm, in quotes. I would see my friends from school or university and none of them had a body very similar to mine. Today, I have it very normalized," states Olalla. She also celebrates that the passage of time has been breaking down prejudices about the strong woman, until shattering them completely.

In 2022, she had written on Instagram: "A year ago, it was impossible to post this photo. I didn't want to wear tops because my arms looked 'big and strong.' And, clearly, it is not normal to see a girl like that. I didn't like wearing shorts because of the type of legs I was getting. I had insecurities about going 'outside the norm' or I would even get ashamed of my body. Not today. Things are no longer like that, luckily," she now emphasizes.

In fact, she claims that there are more and more girls. "At the very top, there is still a lack of level because there are still few of us. It has indeed been growing and improving, but above all, there is a lot of schooling. Nowadays there are almost more women than men," asserts Olalla. Catalonia has gone from four female licenses in 2006 to the current 145, almost 50% of the total. Spain has gone from 376 female licenses in 2007 to the current 1,706. Total licenses reached a peak of 561 in Catalonia and 6,556 in Spain during the pandemic years and are now 295 and 3,860, respectively.

"CrossFit became very fashionable and, thanks to that, weightlifting has become much more popular, because a lot of weightlifting is done in CrossFit. In fact, now there are many sports that use weightlifting as part of physical preparation, to work on strength and power," she points out, on the eve of the World Championships. It is the first qualifying competition for the Los Angeles Olympic Games (2028).

She has been dedicated to weightlifting for some time now and travels the world lifting weights, but people around her are still surprised. "My friends can't imagine that I am capable of lifting so much weight. And my grandparents are absolutely amazed. They tell me: "Oh, Maria, when I see you lift so much weight I'm afraid", she confesses.