Cheryl Haworth is fat. When she goes home, she will probably be the fattest Olympic medal holder in Nebraska. Cheryl Haworth is fat and America loves her for it.

Yesterday at Darling Harbour, the large-scale end of women's weightlifting got going, the 75 kg-plus section. The women's weightlifting game is different to men's; there is none of the preening, none of the Herculean posturing; they just get the job done. Time after time, a parade of astonishingly big women tumbled onto the stage - often quite grumpily - and either succeeded or failed to lift their weights.

It came down, quite literally, to the big three of this division - Ding Meiyuan of China, Agata Wrobel from Poland and, of course, Cheryl.

Haworth has become a cause celebre Stateside for reasons not strictly confined to her ability for lifting the equivalent of a baby elephant above her head. In a country where fatism has become as serious a discriminatory issue as sexism or racism, the 17-year-old is quietly, sensibly, breaking boundaries. Obesity is America's great obsession and America's great fear. Over there, to be fat and teenaged and named Cheryl can only mean to be Jerry Springer material. Not so for this kid.

Haworth is an athlete - she dashes 40 yards in 5.5 seconds and has a vertical leap that would overshadow most GAA midfielders. She is also a sketch artist and will go on to college in Savannah in the Autumn. She is articulate and self-assured. Her nickname is "fun" - for reasons that first impressions, admittedly, do not make clear. Virtually every American publication has featured her and Jay Leno did his smarmy, big chin thing in front of her. One of the down sides of winning bronze here in Sydney has to be the inevitable syruping from Letterman and Conan O'Brien in the near future.

Yesterday afternoon, hordes of American pressmen filed into the normally sleepy weightlifting arena to see their star do her thing with the big bars. Haworth only took up weightlifting in 1997 and excelled straight way. Her coach, Michael Cohen is flabbergasted by her strength, given that she is just 17. They are aiming gold for Athens. Yesterday, third place was perfect.

Afterwards, as Cheryl sat along side the more conventionally built Meiyuan - who broke the world record - the questions quickly and bluntly turned to her weight.

"Ahh . . . if you're kind of a . . . `big person', and you win a bronze medal, will your life be less, eh, difficult?" was one of the many stupefying clangers she handled with the grace of a ballerina.

"Well, I don't think my life was difficult before - I am good natured about what is happening to me, I have lots of friends behind me and I hope I provide a good example for people. You know, weightlifting isn't as popular as it should be, it's a wonderful sport and I hope I encourage people to take it up."

Haworth's size is down to genetics and, well, food. Her father used to wrestle for the University of Nebraska and it was always unlikely his offspring would be delicate.

Also, she was brought up in the "come and get it while it's hot and wallop it back anyhow even if it's not" school of eating.

"When my daughter sits down and says she is still hungry, I'd feed her again," says Mrs Haworth.

"I don't want her hating me or for this to be a battleground. I give her fat-free milk at home, fruit - good food. If she's going to be big, she'll be big."

The USA could do worse than adapt that sentence as a mantra. Haworth, who tips the scales to 131 kg (20 st, 9 lbs), is simply unaware of her weight. "I don't really have a diet," she yawned. "I eat well, eat healthily, sometimes what I feel like."

In this Olympic melting pot of beautiful bodies and fretting souls, it seems like Cheryl Haworth has all it sussed out.