Watch: Teenage Maltese Athlete Places 6th Globally In Snatch Event At Junior World Championship
Maltese weightlifting queen Tenishia Thornton has just come off the back of a brilliant showing at the IWF Junior World Championships, smashing several records along the way.
Thornton won her group (55kg B category) and hit a 6th place overall finish in the snatch, a 9th place overall in the clean and jerk, and an 8th place overall in the total.
If that’s not enough, all five of her attempts were enough to smash her current senior national record. Not by one or two kilos, but by a whopping 18kg.
She didn’t stop there. Thornton also broke the snatch youth commonwealth record by 6kg, the clean and jerk youth commonwealth record by 5kg, and the total by 10kg.
As a side note, the 16-year-old was one of the youngest competitors in the group.
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“I am over the moon with what I managed to accomplish in this competition,” Thornton wrote on social media.
In competition, she managed all her snatch attempts at 77kg, 79kg, and 81kg. She then went on to open her clean and jerks with 97kg, followed by a near-miss at 99kg, but then managed it on her third attempt.
After topping the B group, she competed in the A group, surpassing highly ranked international athletes.
The championship sat just a few weeks before the Youth World Championships which will be held in Mexico in June.
With Thornton set to compete against athletes in her age group, could we see more records potentially broken?
You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but Tenishia Thornton is probably the strongest teenager you will ever meet. See for yourself in the video below:
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