All questions and discussion related to the 15-17 May 2009 Deadlift meet is warmly welcome here.

To sign up for the meet, go here.

Hi Kris! I need to change my day to Sunday... we can change up until the day the meet, right?

Hi Kris! I need to change my day to Sunday... we can change up until the day the meet, right?

Hi Kat, sure thing, I will add you to the Sunday crew. This hasn't yet been formally added to the rules, but for now we will roll with this suggestion posted on the rules thread:

I suggest setting the deadline to four days out from the first day of the meet. In other words, given a meet set Friday through Sunday, Monday meet week would be the last day to change the lifting date. For fairness, this should be tied to the local time zone so that the time expires at midnight local time.

That post also has my view on why I think we should not allow the meet date to be changed closer to the meet. In short, there is no real reason why lifters could not just sign up and lift on any day of the weekend without further notice, but as we've gone down the route of mimicking real meets to the degree applicable, I think it's a good idea to force lifters to be ready the day it's time to go... rain or shine. Just like in a real meet... with the twist that we provide three lifting date options instead of one and still provide some room for life to happen thanks to the option to change the meet date up until the first day of the meet week.

Sounds good. Thanks!

All lifters should now have received an e-mail with the access details for this meet. If you haven't please e-mail me ASAP at kristoffer@virtualmeet.net. The final line-up has also been posted.

Good luck everyone!

Time for an update. All lifters have now uploaded and everything seems to be in order based on a first quick check. We also have a second judge now thanks to Philipp Zgoll volunteering. If nobody else gets in touch, I will again assume the role of the third judge so we are in the clear.

The meet should be with the judges within two days if no surprises pop up along the way.

The meet is now with the judges. As usual, they will have one week to finish judging, i.e. by May 28th. I'm stepping in to fill the last judge spot. An exciting meet ahead!

The meet has been judged. Release is tentatively scheduled for late Tuesday GMT. Thanks to Christian and Philipp for another solid judging job.

There were some amazing lifts in this meet! Nice job everyone.

And good music too.

Ok, the meet has been released! Plenty of exciting stuff... especially Gabe Wetzel showed a lot of attitude by fighting it all the way on his third attempt at his opening weight.

Unfortunately, Ivan Kirov bombed out due to wearing socks.

Over to you folks!

Wow - what an excellent meet!

Great lifting from Tyler to win by a fair margin, very impressive. Chris - that 450lb lift went up fairly easily - I reckon you'd have nailed a 470 or so?

Excellent stuff from Kris and Gabe - I'm blown away by Kris' strength at just 16 years of age. Great potential.

Super lifting from the Claudia and Kat too - big numbers and performed in good style.

Very inspiring for me all round - now I just need to work on my rather meagre numbers!

Hi Ben - thanks, I've had a 520 in competition.  I think I had 475lbs in this meet; unfortunately, 2 out of 3 don't agree.  I think one judge may have hit the wrong button when listing 'reason for failure' - my pause was a full 3 seconds.  Not saying the lift should count, but fail me for something else
Thanks again Kris, we had a great time. 

I second everything Ben said. I'd also add the comment that I found this to be the first deadlift meet that was not a complete walk through in terms of judging. There were a number of lifts I gave a good number of replays before casting my call, Chris' third attempt deadlift among them.

Chris, if you take a look at the description for the no_pause call it states:

Failure to assume a briefly paused erect position with the shoulders in an erect position and knees locked

For all powerlifts, the pause at the top includes both a clause related to actually pausing and a clause related to the elbows (bench) or the knees being locked (squat, deadlift). The reason you were flagged by one judge with the no_pause reason was that he felt that your knees were not properly locked out. If you take a close look at the lift, you'll notice that you in fact did push knees out but immediately bent them back a bit afterwards. My personal opinion is that the call is justified, but I would have no problem having it go either way. Just looking at the "no pause" part of the call, I perfectly understand why you would feel the call to be absurd, indeed the name for that particular call could perhaps be made more descriptive.

Personally, I flagged it down for what I feel was a brief moment of thigh support after you cleared the knees. It was not the archetypal resting of the complete weight on the thighs, but I felt you pushed the knees forward while leaning back in a way that momentarily caused a small but clear offload.   

While I think that our use of video makes our calls quite consistent and weens out the most common judging mistakes that are sometimes hard to avoid in live judging, we still have to accept that calls can become quite subjective in those cases where a lift clearly isn't totally clean but still not totally out of line either. In some cases, a lift can also end up being flagged down due to two of the judges finding two totally unrelated mistakes in the lift, but that is the nature of rule by majority. Again, in this case I don't think there was any judging mistake, but good arguments could be made both for and against these calls. I also think it's good that we discuss the technicalities of judging on this level because it helps unify our judging policies and also makes it clear for lifters what our line is. That said, I've been positively surprised how little comments our judging has got, especially as only a minority of us hold official judging licenses. It's still on the order of what I can fit on the fingers on one hand which is not shabby for 1071 judged attempts.

In any case, very impressive lifting. I'm sure you'll smash that lift in another meet.

Hey guys - trying to be funny, not critical of the judges.  I've had similar calls made at other meets; it's just my technique.  If I'm at a meet with only a judge in front on the DL, I never have a problem.  If there's side judging, I usually get at least one red light unless the judge is familiar with my lifting.  It's to be expected.  Take note of my camera angle next time, though.  haha.

Ah ok. Chris, seems to me like the video angle you will be coming in with next meet is a good side shot. Once you clear your lifts consistently from that angle you will also clear them consistently in any meet.