Name: Holley Mangold
Sport: Weightlifting
Hometown: Centerville, Ohio
Age: 22
Why you should care about her: Mangold is the younger sister of New York Jets center Nick Mangold. She also appeared on MTV's True Life: I'm the Big Girl. She's been in the news ever since high school, where she played four years of football and became the first girl to appear in an Ohio state championship game.
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Even without her pseudo-celebrity, Mangold would be noteworthy simply for being so new to her sport. In high school, she was only a weightlifting dilettante, but she nevertheless won a state title at a meet where, SI.com informs us, competitors ate pork chops for breakfast. She attended the nearly all-female Ursuline College, where she would crack the windows on the first story of a building after dropping weights on the second story, which is pretty cool. When she began training in earnest only three and a half years ago, Mangold's original goal was to make the 2016 Olympics in Rio, but after a remarkable improvement over the past year she has earned a trip to London. At last check, she was living in fellow lifter Drew Dillon's laundry room.
Olympic/world championships experience: Her only international experience came at the 2010 Pan American Championships, where she took eighth place. On the national level, she is the two-time American Open champion, winning in 2009 and 2011. She also won the junior national championship in 2008, her first time competing in the event.
Sexy-pose threat level:
Olympic archetype: Rulon Gardner, Gillian Boxx
Scouting report from home country: From ESPN The Magazine:
Mangold can't wait. Her family will be there to cheer her on, minus Nick, who will be at Jets training camp but plans to call or text his well wishes and watch on TV. As for getting to the podium, Mangold, whose personal-best total is 562 pounds, said she's aiming to lift north of 617, which should put her in the range for bronze. With a little bit of luck, she'll pull it off.
Scouting report from some guy on the internet: David Portnoy, Barstool Boston:
[...] I'm a Holly Mangold fan. And not in a point and make fun of the fat bitch type of way either. I'm a legit fan. I'm not laughing at her. I'm laughing with her. She won me over on True Life and I've been a fan ever since. She's just the real deal. Nothing fake about her. As comfortable in her own skin as a human can be. Never says anything to make herself look good or win endorsement deals. She knows she's a huge fat bitch and she's cool with it. I know she doesn't look like what famous athletes who gets endorsement deals should look like, but I don't care. I'm on team Mangold and she is literally the only person I'll be rooting for at the Olympics. And if I was Wheaties I'd put her ugly mug on the cover of my cereal.
Did you know? Holley outweighs her brother by somewhere between 30 and 70 pounds.
Forecast for 2012: Since women's weightlifting became a medal event at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, no American woman has won gold. Mangold's personal best is 562 pounds—that's a combined total of her clean and jerk lift and her snatch lift—but she says her goal is to do better than 617 pounds in London. South Korea's Jang Mi-Ran took gold in the super-heavyweight division at Beijing with 717 pounds. The bronze medal winner had a total of 594 pounds. A medal isn't out of the question for Mangold, but it'll be tough.
Relevant Bob Costas facial expression: