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Near the very bottom of South Carolina, in the salt-marsh-soaked town of Beaufort, across the verdant main drag from a national cemetery that serves as the final resting place of some 2,800 Union fighters, sits a single-story brick building that abuts a cluster of corrugated-metal garages. Inside, weight plates, racks, and boxes compete for space along the scuff-marked cinderblock walls while oversized fans keep the sticky air circulating. As shrines to fitness go, CrossFit Beaufort is about as far from state-of-the-art as this military outpost is from Tokyo.

Yet this box produced 19-year-old C.J. Cummings, America’s best hope of snapping a 36-year Olympic-weightlifting-medal drought at the 2020 Games. At the 2016 U.S. Olympic trials, Cummings fell just short of earning a spot in the Rio Games as a 15-year-old. He has already won six world championships (four junior and two youth) and has the second-highest number of Olympic qualifying points among lifters in his weight class. “Over the past two months,” says Cummings, who’s also taking classes in business at a local college, “I’ve broken 30 records alone.”

The five-five, 160-pound strongman was recently called “the LeBron James of weightlifting” (The Wall Street Journal), and that endears him to the CF Beaufort veterans old enough to remember when a diapered C. J. would run around mimicking his older sister, Crystal—the first Cummings-family protégée of lifting coach Ray Jones. His roster of standouts also includes 17-year-old Dade Stanley, a two-time American youth champion, and Mahassen Hala Fattouh, Lebanon’s first-ever female weightlifter. Within six months of taking up the sport at ten years old, C. J. became a YouTube sensation after completing a clean and jerk of double his bodyweight (198 pounds), the youngest American male lifter to do so.

Cummings has worked with Jones since then, and his approach is based on listening to his body. Broadly speaking, his program consists of periodized progression, lifting closer and closer to his one-rep maxes as he builds up to a competition. Each day’s workload is entirely dependent on what Jones sees and feels. Some training days are dedicated to lifting, whereas others focus on active recovery, with an emphasis on stability, mobility, and core work. “A few years ago, high-level athletes were going day after day after day because they were on performance-enhancing drugs,” Jones says, referring to doping scandals that have bedeviled the sport for the past six decades. “But now, in this new age, less is more.”

Cummings hopes his Tokyo medal quest inspires a wider fitness movement back home. “I want parents to bring their kids here to sign up for weightlifting. I want to help save the sport and keep it poppin’ year-round.”

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