There are a lot of meet recaps out there—and here is mine.
“Wtf, you didn’t compete, bro.”
Correct. But this was my first time organising the Hong Kong Powerlifting Championships.
And I hope I never forget the moment I was holding a pee cup for drug testing in one hand, a phone in the other to direct volunteers, while shouting at fully grown adults not to run into the weigh-ins room when it was not their turn.
That was when it really landed: I was no longer just helping out at a meet. I was responsible for this shit.
I had volunteered in almost every position by this point, apart from spotting and the tech desk. I thought I understood the rhythm of a competition.
What I had not understood was the difference between helping to hold up one part of the room and being responsible for noticing everything happening inside it.
From 9 minutes to 65*9 minutes
As an athlete, the competition day is so nice. You make weight, warm up, choose attempts, find your friends, and make your nine minutes count.
It is intense, but it is beautifully simple. The platform is everything.
Organising Championships expanded that world very fast.
There were sixty-five athletes, each with their own nine-minute window, nerves, expectations, and questions. There were more than thirty volunteers to coordinate. There were weigh-ins, drug testing, records, equipment, timing, flights, athlete posts, messages, referee matters, and a constant stream of tiny things that could become bigger things if nobody noticed them early enough.
There was no time to focus on just one person’s experience, even when that person was a friend. The job was to keep the whole day moving well enough that every athlete could focus on their own platform time.
A good meet should feel simple to the people competing in it. They should be able to show up, warm up, take their attempts, and leave knowing what they have to do. They should not have to see the last-minute changes, the frantic instructions, the pee cup, or the hungry adults being told to queue properly.
That is what the organising team is there for.
Some people know this story already, but I only accepted the job because I thought I could do it with a friend. Somewhere along the way, our values stopped aligning and we naturally drifted apart. The federation’s admin became the child of the divorce, which is a slightly dramatic way of saying that I suddenly felt an immense amount of pressure to get things right.
I wanted to do it right. But there was a huge learning curve I had to get through first.
The biggest adjustment was learning that I could not always move through the meet as a friend first. I wanted to be in the crowd for people I care about. I wanted to celebrate their good lifts, run back stage and hug them when they hit their PRs.
But I had to put those feelings somewhere else.
There were referee decisions on particular items that I did not necessarily agree with personally. Once I was there as an organiser, however, I had to—must, absolutely must—stand by the referee and the process. Not because I stopped caring about athletes. It was because the referees are my people too.
Everywhere and nowhere
There were points during Championships where I felt like I was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I was moving between rooms and then leaving before I could properly stay for any of it. I was there for almost every part of the day, but I was never fully in one place long enough to experience it.
At first, that felt odd. Afterwards, I realised it was probably the point.
The athletes had their platform. The volunteers had clear roles. The referees could do their jobs. The crowd could watch, cheer, and care. I had helped make room for all of those things to happen, without needing to be in of any of them.
For that, I am grateful.
Next time, though, I would quite like to go back to worrying about only nine minutes.
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