A very special Online World Cup Series

To mark the one-year-to-go celebrations to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, World Para Powerlifting will host a special edition of the Online World Cup Series, presented by BIGSER.

The fourth Online World Cup will be shown on a live programme on World Para Powerlifting Facebook page on Monday (31 August) at 4:00 PM (Central European Summer Time - CEST).

Fifty-four athletes from a record number of 21 countries submitted videos to participate in the competition. Six nations made their debut: Benin, Cape Verde, Egypt, Lithuania and Spain.

The videos will be judged live by World Para Powerlifting Technical Officials on Monday’s show. 

The winner of the Online World Cup Series will receive a bar, courtesy of World Para Powerlifting Official Partner, Eleiko.

The fourth edition will also be the first to see a Team Competition where athletes will earn points for their country.

Russia’s Vera Muratova is the current overall series leader in the women’s category with 193.5 points. Italian teammates Paolo Agosti and Matteo Cattini top the men’s category with 150.5 points each.

Bronze medallist at last year’s World Championships in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan in the women’s up to 86 kg, Muratova won the first and the third editions. 

Mexico’s three-time Paralympic champion Amalia Perez was the winner of the second series.

In the men’s competition, Nur-Sultan 2019 bronze medallist in the up to 97 kg category Fabio Torres of Colombia won the inaugural series.

Jordan’s two-time World Championships bronze medallist Abdelkareem Khattab took first place in the second edition while Kazakhstan’s David Degtyarev won the third series. 

The Online World Cup Series was the first Paralympic sport competition created during the COVID-19 pandemic to offer athletes the possibility to remain active and motivated while training from home.

Athletes submit videos of their attempts through an online platform. The final scores are based on a statistical coefficient used to equalise and compare athletes’ performances between different body weights.

Fantasy Game

The Series also include a virtual competition in which four Team Captains draft two female and two male powerlifters trying to predict their results.

Team captains are Amalia Perez (Team Blue), Egypt’s Paralympic champion Sherif Osman (Team Red), Italy’s national team coach Alessandro Boraschi (Team Yellow) and Brazil’s World Para Powerlifting Head of Competition Pedro Meloni (Team Green).

Powerlifting fans from all over the world can also join through a Fantasy Game and compare their results with the captains’. To create your team visit the Fantasy Game Registration Page.

You can follow the Online World Cup Series on World Para Powerlifting social media pages on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.