In September 2016 the championships won the 2016 SportsTravel Best Amateur Single-Sport Event of the Year, awarded for what SportsTravel Magazine described as "its superior organisation and spectator attendance, [and] for creating superior experience for competitors and spectators".[2]
Despite this accolade, ESPN would later speculate that these championships may have been "the public bottoming out for weightlifting". Before the event, the International Weightlifting Federation and the United States Anti-Doping Agency had a public conflict over which entity would perform drug testing. After an agreement was reached, the USADA, according to ESPN, "aggressively target-tested athletes from teams at high risk for doping and asked hotel security and cleaning staff to report when they found syringes and vials in wastebaskets." A total of 24 samples from the competition came back positive. With the sport's doping issues now laid bare, the IWF responded by banning Russia and Bulgaria from the 2016 Olympics, and later imposed a one-year suspension on nine nations, including Russia but not Bulgaria.[3]
