Planes, trains, and loads of fan photographs — right here’s what it’s wish to journey as a medal-winning Olympic athlete.
Final up to date on July twenty first, 2024
Ever since she received a medal on the 2020 Olympics, Kate Vibert has been embroiled in a beef with the Transportation Safety Administration.
“[The medal] virtually at all times will get flagged once I’m going by means of airport safety,” Vibert tells BarBend, happy on the probability to vent about it. “It reveals up as a big, darkish circle on their scanners.” Like a kind of Looney Tunes bombs that Wile E. Coyote was infatuated with, or possibly a palm-sized black gap.
Vibert is knowledgeable weightlifter whose fast ascent within the sport started when she took up the barbell in 2016. 5 years later, she received a silver medal within the Ladies’s 76-kilogram occasion on the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. On the time, it was solely the fourth ever earned by an American lady at a Video games occasion.
We’ve all been there — sweaty and anxious within the TSA safety line, not on the Olympic podium — ready to see if the brokers will dismantle our carefully-packed baggage to research a tube of toothpaste within the title of nationwide safety or no matter. For Vibert, further time within the TSA line is simply one thing she’s realized to anticipate.
The Winner’s Circle
At weightlifting competitions (known as meets by insiders), athletes are awarded their medals only some minutes after they end competing. Particles of chalk mud the lifting platform like powdered sugar, after which are hurriedly broomed off as attendants assemble a three-tier podium for the athletes.
Vibert recounts taking two teary-eyed steps as much as the second-place podium in Tokyo, the place she donned her medal herself. Along with a slew of different COVID-19 restrictions (Vibert says every day testing and full-time masking had been the norm within the Olympic Village), protocol prevented officers from adorning the medalists.
There are, after all, photograph ops on the closure of any Olympic occasion. Ravenous photographers coil across the medalists snapping image after image. Vibert is not any stranger to reputation — she received the World Weightlifting Championships in 2019, solely three years into her profession — however an Olympic medal hangs otherwise.
- “I keep in mind it being uncomfortable to put on,” she remembers.
To the Gram: After putting it on her toilet scale at residence, Vibert famous that her medal weighs round 550 grams, or simply over a pound.
On the Street
Afterward, and along with her arms nonetheless carved uncooked from the barbell’s knurling, Vibert wrapped the medal’s necklace round it and wedged it snugly into her backpack. It wasn’t till she returned residence to Michigan weeks later — Crew USA’s weightlifters celebrated their Tokyo marketing campaign with a pit-stop trip in Hawaii — that she truly obtained a field for the medal within the mail.
- “They despatched me a particular wood field with a magnetic lid,” says Vibert. “I attempt to maintain it tucked away, however once I journey with it, I deliver the entire thing.”
Within the months following her Olympic efficiency, Vibert launched into a strong and nationwide seminar tour, educating aspirant weightlifters the nuts and bolts of barbell wizardry. The medal at all times goes with.
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After she litigates with the TSA, Vibert is often stopped once more within the concourse; extra typically if she wears her Crew USA jacket.
- “Folks acknowledge me from social media, or they ask what sport I’m concerned with,” Vibert remarks. “I really like listening to about their very own journeys.”
She is, after all, prompted to unbox her medal right here and there. “The very first thing folks say once they maintain it’s, ‘wow, it’s so heavy,” Vibert jokes.
It’s All Relative: Skilled weightlifters are uniquely attuned to the thought of heavy. Her silver medal might weigh about half as a lot as a run-of-the-mill DSLR digicam, however Vibert — who weighs 165 kilos — received it by lifting 304 kilos over her head.
When she’s not lugging her medal by means of airport safety or conducting weightlifting seminars, Vibert spends a lot of her post-Olympics profession at residence along with her husband and two German shepherds, Theo and Dani. House affords a much-needed reprieve from being the (in all probability) most well-known particular person at Delta gate B-14.
However don’t get her mistaken — tangling with the TSA or falling into the identical dialog with completely different strangers wears on Vibert a little bit, however she wouldn’t commerce it for the world.
“Successful an Olympic medal was the head of my profession,” she says. It could pressure her neck sometimes, however a silver medal is value its weight in gold.
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Featured Picture: @katevibert / Instagram