This is a showdown, the music says. Don’t touch that dial.

There are elements of “Survivor” as well, including a camera-ready host who appears on a series of large video screens and warms up the crowd before the action begins and during a 10-minute intermission.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for a very exciting snatch,” he said, with innocent sincerity, during halftime Sunday.

The athletes in this version of “Survivor” are their own tribes, and each faces the same foe: ring after ring of weights. The competitors approach the foe in their own way. Sergio Alvarez Boulet of Cuba puts his hands around the bar and screams at it a couple of times. Yuderqui Contreras of the Dominican Republic grabs the bar and gently nods her head over it, as though she were double-checking the terms of a deal she and the weights negotiated a few days earlier.

The drama starts before the athlete even gets on stage. Each has one minute to attempt a lift, and after 30 seconds, a horn blasts. It is loud and long enough that if you heard it while driving it would come across as “Move along, pal.”

Some attempts are over nanoseconds after they begin, as though the athlete got the barbell an inch off the ground and thought, Oh, you’ve got to be kidding. If competitors fail three times in either skill, their Olympics are over.

An unseen narrator with a refined British accent helpfully details the stakes, sometimes by providing biographical information; “Before she became a weight lifter, she was a circus performer.” Often there are exhortations to the crowd to chip in with cheers; “O.K., ladies and gentlemen, let’s wind her up so she can make this.”