Ben Camille this week visited Malta’s leading weightlifters training at the Cottonera Sports Complex.
Maltese weightlifters have enjoyed a lot of success over the last few years with Yazmin Zammit Stevens managing to represent Malta at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo while rising star Tenishia Thornton won medals at the Commonwealth Championships and the World Youth Championships.
Jesmond Caruana, the Malta Weightlifting Association president, said that the sport has grown in popularity in the last few months, with female participation reaching higher numbers than their male counterparts, particularly at youth level.
“It’s quite a remarkable change in trend,” Caruana said.
“At the start, it was quite difficult for us to have girls to start practising weightlifting but we managed to change the trend as today in the young generation we have more girls taking up the sport than boys.