Women's weightlifting was first included in the Olympic Games in 2000.
The event made its Olympic debut at the Sydney Games in Australia. Before that, women had already established an international competitive tradition: women's events were added to the IWF World Weightlifting Championships in 1987, thirteen years before their Olympic introduction. The Sydney program featured seven women's weight classes, alongside the men's competitions.
Olympic weightlifting is contested through two lifts: the snatch, in which the bar is lifted from the floor to overhead in one continuous motion, and the clean and jerk, in which the athlete first brings the bar to the shoulders before driving it overhead. An athlete's total is the combined result of the best successful snatch and clean and jerk.
A common mix-up is confusing the first Olympic women's competition in 2000 with the first women's world championships in 1987. Another nearby fact is that weightlifting itself appeared at earlier Olympic Games, but its format changed over time; the modern two-lift format began at the 1976 Olympics.