The American Open is a national championship meet which allows lifters in all age groups to compete against one another as long as they can meet the qualifying totals. It's the last chance for the best lifters in each weight class to showcase just how good they are on a national stage. And apparently, it's also a chance for almost a thousand lifters to add "American Open Competitor" to their resume.

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You read that right. The 2015 American Open has well over 900 lifters on the start list, which really makes no sense no matter how you look at it.

The purpose of any national meet is to bring together the best of the best and see who can make a push onto international teams, increase their stipend from the US Olympic Committee, earn a spot at the Olympic Training Center, and market themselves to potential sponsors. For the other 700 lifters who don't actually have a chance at making any of those things happen, the only purpose the American Open serves for them is a chance to add something cute to their social media profiles and make a couple instagram posts about how the competition didn't go the way they expected it to.

Since 2012, the American Open start list has more than tripled and yet this does nothing to make the competition better at finding the best of the best. The growth of the start list hasn't been in the top 10, it's been in the bottom 150 in each weight class. Look at it this way: according to USA Weightlifting, there are 7,000 registered athletes, coaches, and referees in their organization and the over 900 registered lifters at the American Open makes up almost 13% of the entire organization.

With over 900 competitors, the logistics of the event also fall into disarray. American national events have been plagued with technical issues and delays over the past few years and a lot of that is because of how large the competitive field has become.

For example, the men's 85kg weight class has 172 lifters spanning 10 flights, all the way to a J session. A large lifting meet might have a C session. USAW could have increased the qualifying total by 10kg and still require an E session to accommodate the 70+ lifters left.

It's all well and good to have large national meets, but having national meets where the competitive field is uncontrollably large takes away from the point of national competitions and unfairly hurts the actual competitive lifters.

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If the American Open is to continue serving as a competitive national meet, a place where athletes like Jared Fleming are shown respect and given the forum they need to perform the best they can, USAW needs to dramatically increase the qualifying totals and make the American Open a meet that finds, showcases, and rewards the truly competitive athletes in the sport.