- Campbell finished behind China’s Wenwen Li and South Korea’s Hyejeong Park
- The Team GB star won the second Olympic medal of her weightlifting career
- Campbell performed a cartwheel after securing the bronze medal
With a dubious somersault and a plea to the directors of Strictly Come Dancing, Emily Campbell wrapped up Britain’s Olympic campaign with a bronze medal in weightlifting.
It takes a certain character to make a warehouse full of cast iron plates look glamorous, but Campbell knows how to brighten the room.
With her multi-coloured hair and sparkling nails, she was the latest feel-good story of these Games. The Nottingham girl who once relied on free fruit and veg from Bulwell Market worked at a special needs school to fund her obscure journey to become a two-time Olympian.
She had won silver in Tokyo, but this was a step down from the podium. The weights were so heavy that support staff wheeled them in on a cart. There was a smell of smelling salts, a deep meditative breath and a creaking of every joint in Campbell’s body as she achieved scores of 126kg in the snatch and 162kg in the clean and jerk.
She set a personal best on the day, but the field is stronger than three years ago. China’s Li Wenwen, affectionately known at home as Big Baby, was unstoppable. Hyejeong Park from Korea was a more realistic target, but both Asian rivals lifted the weight of a small panda.
Emily Campbell won the bronze medal in the women’s weightlifting event -81 kg+
The 30-year-old’s third place in Paris brought her Olympic medal total to two
And she celebrated in style, doing a somersault across the stage to the delight of the audience.
“A good lift is just putting your hands on the bar, setting yourself up and letting the rest flow,” Campbell said. “You don’t really have time to think about anything. Today my snatches just felt insane. They haven’t felt this good in a long time. I just put my hands on the bar, pulled and they went exactly where they needed to go.”
Campbell has scars across her collarbone, where the bar rests on her chest. She has repeated these moves over and over again in her no-frills gym on an industrial estate in Alfreton, but here she was competing against the strongest women in the world.
Her coach watched desperately from the sidelines, calculating the numbers she needed to hit to outdo her Korean rival. Weightlifting is like a game of heavy-metal chess, but Campbell collapsed on her final attempt at 174kg in the clean and jerk.
“I knew it was going to be tough because I saw red weights and no other color,” she said. “My coaches kind of scolded me and said I was too relaxed. It’s the Olympics. When you see three reds, you know it’s over 350 pounds, so I knew it was going to be a big challenge. But you have to believe in that moment, you can’t have any element of doubt.”
The 135kg British body positivity campaigner said goodbye in style. Her Tokyo medal opened up a world of possibilities and she became a model for Schwarzkopf. Here, her hair was dyed red, white and blue, with the five Olympic rings at the back.
“I had to bring something special,” she said, after a trip with a celebrity hairstylist. “We touched the rings this morning. It was a little heavy, but they were all sewn on and they added to the look. I had to bring out something big.
The medal winners were all smiles on the podium as Li celebrated winning gold in Paris
“When I started lifting weights, my goal was always to get to the Olympics in Paris and try to get a medal. Tokyo was just a bonus along the way. This is special, we achieved the goal we set.”
She left the room with some amateur gymnastics, unscrewing herself from the Olympic bubble and returning to reality. ‘If Strictly wants me,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t say no.’
