When you’re a big, strong girl — a really big, strong girl — it’s easier to pull the table to your chair than to scoot your chair toward the table. Doorknobs need to be tightened, or you might pull them off. Holley Mangold, 22 and a superheavyweight Olympic weight lifter, is 5-foot-8 and weighs 350 pounds. When she squats, which she can do with 525 pounds on her shoulders, she looks almost wholly like an egg. “I get a lot of Creepy McCreepersons interested in me because I’m so big it’s not normal, it’s like a fetish,” she told me one day in the gym. “And I don’t like to sit outside. Not because I don’t like to be outside, but usually there are plastic chairs. Once you break a couple plastic chairs, you’re afraid of them all.”

Olympic weight lifting consists of two lifts: the snatch and the clean-and-jerk. The movements are more pole vault than bench press — Houdini-like feats of physics and grace. For the snatch, the lifter squats and stands explosively, accelerating the bar overhead, then drops back down into a squat. For the clean-and-jerk, the lifter squats, lifts the bar to the clavicle, then jumps into a lunge while thrusting the bar up. In March at the Olympic trials, held at the Arnold (as in Schwarzenegger) Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio, Mangold snatched 110 kilos (242.5 pounds) and clean-and-jerked 145 kilos (319.7 pounds), placing just behind the other woman in her weight category selected for the Olympic team, Sarah Robles.

The snatch takes about four seconds. The clean-and-jerk takes about eight. To prepare for her short time on the platform in London, Mangold sleeps, plays Mario Kart 64, eats, ices her knees (arthritis from playing 12 years of football, including on her high-school team), moves hot boxes filled with ribs and pulled pork for her catering job at City Barbeque and trains with the Columbus Weightlifting Club.

The club is little more than a plywood platform and a few thousand pounds of iron at the back of the North Y.M.C.A. in Columbus. The whole sport of Olympic weight lifting in the United States is scruffy: no money, low participation; it’s our Jamaican bobsled team. By contrast, Holley’s brother Nick, who plays center for the New York Jets in the N.F.L., signed a contract extension worth $54 million over seven years. Holley won junior nationals at 18, after just three months in the sport, but she still needed to be prodded to train for the Olympics. Drew Dillon, her friend, lifting partner and now agent, told her: “What are you doing? You have a shot. Stop being an idiot.”