Neisi Dajomes Barrera becomes the first woman to win Olympic gold medal for Ecuador

Neisi Dajomes Barrera won the women’s 76kg weightlifting at Tokyo 2020 to become Ecuador’s first woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

She finished with 263 points courtesy of a 118kg lift in the snatch and 145kg in the clean and jerk.

“I feel really happy and really proud. I’m the first woman in Ecuador to get a gold medal,” she said after the competition. “In the clean and jerk it was the first time I had lifted 145kg. The training regimen had given me the strength to be comfortable in all my competitions, and that’s what you can see.”

Wearing a multicoloured headband she said: “I’ve been lifting for 12 years and I’ve always tried to get myself noticed this way, to show myself as having something on my head, having my nails painted or having different socks or different-coloured shoes. Just because I’m a weightlifting woman doesn’t mean that I have to not look like a woman, not present myself as a woman or cannot place myself this way.”