Jenny Arthur, Coach Stan Luttrell and Norik Vardanian celebrate after Jenny Arthur is named to the USA Olympic Team on May 8, 2016 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Visitors to her Instagram account will notice that Olympian weightlifter Jenny Arthur is now Jenny Vardanian, in case they missed her post Tuesday morning of her and new husband Norik Vardanian.
“I am so happy to share the greatest moments of our life with everyone!” Jenny Vardanian wrote in the post.
The wedding comes just under one year on from the couple’s engagement at the 2019 IWF World Championships in Thailand, where Vardanian won her first world championship medals, a silver medal in clean & jerk and bronze in total. It was a fitting place for an engagement as Norik is a former competitive weightlifter himself, and his father Yuri was a gold medalist for the Soviet Union in 1980.
Together, the couple co-own Vardanian Weightlifting in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Jenny has been able to keep training as she pursues her second Olympic Games, now postponed to 2021. Originally from Gainesville, Georgia, the 26-year-old made her Olympic debut in 2016, coming in sixth at 75 kg. The first U.S. woman to compete at 75 kg. at the Games since 2000, Vardanian won her world championship medals at the non-Olympic 81 kg.
She made her world championship debut in 2013, and steadily improved from 2014 on from 14th to on the podium in 2019. She is a three-time silver medalist at the Pan American Games and a former junior Pan Am champion.
