Update: all the lifts have now been confirmed as being uploaded. 24 lifters made it to the meet and submitted a total of 214 clips.

However, six lifters had minor omissions in their lifter info. This info is needed before the meet can be moved to the judges. The meet is still likely to be with the judges by late Wednesday GMT unless it takes longer than anticipated to get the outstanding info.

So, looking quite good so far.

We're working on it. In Canada we only have those wind-up computers made of wood. They're slower than normal. Some of the people are that way too......made of wood and slower than normal.

Sorry for any inconvenience. Everyone had a great time and lots of new Personal Bests.

I predict Canada will win the team title - AGAIN.

TNT

I predict Canada will win the team title - AGAIN.

I predict that sometime this year, we will see the first real team competitions enter the arena. Until then, the team title is likely to perpetually go to Canada. 

Canada will populate the earth with strong people. Darwin WAS right.

TNT

Update: I got the missing info from one of the six lifters. The meet will move to the judges as soon as I have all the missing details.

The info for one lifter is still missing. I just sent the lifter in question a reminder. Sorry for the delay folks. If I don't get the info by the end of this week I will drop the lifter so we can move forward.

I got the last piece of missing info, the meet is now with the judges! \o/

As nobody volunteered for the third judging slot, the usual backup was enlisted (me). Each judge is facing 9 rounds of 24 lifts so there's some serious work to be done. As usual, we are shooting at having the meet judged within one week from today, e.g. at the end of next week's Sunday (March 29th). You can follow the judging progress in real time in the box above the forums.

Hang in there everyone!

Sign up for the April meets will open tomorrow late GMT time.

To add to the above, a description of how the judging works can be found here.

Hey gang, another lack in the documentation was just uncovered.

The intended policy is that judges should not discuss meet lifts until the judging has been completed as to remove even the smallest chance of influencing other judges. However, this policy has not been documented anywhere so judges cannot know this. I'm posting this because I removed two posts by one judge so that nobody wonders why they suddenly disappeared. To make it very clear, these posts were not bad in anyway, but I think it is a good policy to release the whole meet in one go as opposed to starting discussing it while the meet is still in progress.

If anyone has any questions about this, please ask.

As usual, we are shooting at having the meet judged within one week from today, e.g. at the end of next week's Sunday (March 29th).

I'm happy to report that the meet has been judged. Out of the 213 clips, two where cut short and were thus not judgeable. To be fair, I will give the affected lifters until Tuesday to re-upload those clips for judging in case this was caused by upload problems. The schedule now is to have the meet released by late Wednesday.

A warm thanks to Ben and Chris for doing a good job with the judging.

No results yet???

No results yet???

I'm sorry to say that this meet has been a very long process and I am fully aware that lifters are eagerly awaiting the results.

To put it in context: the meet was first delayed for five days due to missing lifter info (which I rather wait for than have six first-time virtualmeeters disqualified off the bat), then the judging took the full seven days to complete mainly because it was a relatively big meet (213 attempts) and I had trouble finding the time to do it in short order. While judging I also noticed that two clips were cut off before the lift commenced, including your second bench press attempt, so I decided to give you and the other lifter a fair chance to re-upload with a late Tuesday deadline in case it would have been a technical glitch (you should have received two mails about that). Out of all the 14 meets we've held so far, only one lift has been confirmed as corrupted so this is not a common occurance. The intention was to have the meet results out yesterday, but due to family reasons it didn't pan out. So this meet is really only one day late due to these circumstances, but yes, it is way behind our target of one week turnaround after the clips have been uploaded.

Frankly, it is still a bit of a challenge to get meets in and out the door in seven days because there are quite a lot of moving pieces involved. I have a lot of supporting scripts, but preparing larger meets for judging and having them released afterwards still takes several hours of work depending on how much manual intervention is needed with video codecs etc. With two young kids at home, most of the time I devote to running the meets and correspondence plus coding on the next generation of this site comes straight out of my sleep. I wouldn't have it any other way, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes I also need to sleep. 

Anyway, I truly hope that this post doesn't come off as blunt, but I figured it may be a good idea to put this into context a bit especially as the meet is so delayed. Again, I will try to make sure that this is an exception rather than a trend. A big thanks to everyone for your patience.

Enough said, I will start preparing the meet for release now.

The meet has finally been released, rankings updated, lift trackers generated, stats refreshed...

There was some stellar lifting in this meet. Among the highlights was Christie Attwood becoming the first woman to break into Class III on the total rankings, but it was also great to see many lifters coming back stronger than ever.

On the downside, this meet also saw quite a few bomb-outs due mainly to the usual suspects, eg. failing to hit depth in the squat and not pausing the bar properly on the bench press. Claudia Gerhards and Ramon Gysin, who otherwise showed solid lifting, unfortunately forgot their proper shoes at home and resorted to squatting and deadlifting in their socks (which is forbidden both in real meets and our meets). Lastly, the UOIT softball team was nearly disqualified due to not displaying the newspaper on any lift. However, they did send me a close up of the paper and because it was posted on the wall visible and easily identified as the same paper on all video the meet date is beyond doubt.

I can't say this enough: everyone, please read the meet instructions and the rules (and don't forget the meet checklist...).

So a mixed bag, but I'm sure that many lessons were learned and we will probably see many of these lifters come back to do even better. As usual, thanks a lot for participating and a pat on the back to the judges for doing a good job. 

Thoughts? Comments? Questions?

Almost forgot: the video player on the meet page apparently did not like the long playlist with well over 600 items (attempts, images, judge lights) causing the Flash player plugin to hang. I will investigate alternatives for dealing with this, but for now I have disabled the round-by-round footage for this meet. Of course, all the lift video is available as usual by clicking the weights on the results.

And: this meet also broke a small milestone... now over a thousand attempts have been submitted (1002 to be precise). We are also approaching 100 unique participating lifters (now 89) and 200 forum members (now 197) and 2000 forum posts (now 1977). This is of course just the beginning, but it's still very exciting to see that we already have some mileage behind us.

THanks Kris for finishing up the meet. Good job everyone participating.
Though I am not contend with my squat depth and BP performance, I was quite happy to deadlift over 200 again without any pain.
I set the squat's up much too wide and need to work on bringing in my stance and get more mobility. I ordered Mark Riptoe's Starting Strength. I hope it can help me with that.

Still need to look at all the videos but already saw some very good lifts.