Yeah, people with well sculpted bodies tend not to do well in power events because they lack the strength at the body core to effectively be "strong" in this manner. Hence, visually, why most power event contestants are as you described - once you start packing muscles in that area, you no longer have that visually pleasing Vee shape and six packs.
It's more complicated than that. Like I said, sport scientists do no know why a heavy-squatting fat athlete will usually become weaker if he loses fat without losing muscle.
Chinese lifters like Chen Lijun and Zhang Jie (retired) have a V shape that can make a wine bottle opener jealous but they are champions and world-record holders. It is a combination of muscle composition, body proportion, and individual technique that creates unique lifters who otherwise would appear to be disadvantaged.
Height or lack of is an advantage here too no?
It's more about being big-boned and mesomorphic that gives you the powerful fulcrums and levers. Taller lifters tend to specialize in the snatch and be weaker in the clean and jerk and more prone to injury.
There is a trend in men's weightlifting that China dominates all of the men's weight classes except the heavy (where we are top 5) and the superheavy (no rank since we haven't let our superheavy come out to play for a long time due to quotas). This leads many people to say that Chinese, or Asians, are genetically smaller so we lack the numbers for talent selection at the top. However, this would be inadequate to explain that phenomenon because Chinese women dominate all weight classes including the superheavies where except for 1 Russian and 1 South Korean, all dominant lifters in the last few decades have come from China. The answer is in two parts. The first part is that although Chinese people are typically smaller than Eastern Europeans, China's vast population makes up for this. The true reason for China's absense in the men's superheavy is cultural. Chinese parents see sending the child to a weightlifting camp as throwing him/her to the wolves and is a last resort only used when they don't believe the child can become prosperous through normal education. (After all, the chances of a 6 year old, no matter how promising s/he may seem at the time, overcoming all the odds and injuries in training to become a champion weightlifer are still as slim as one can imagine.) In Chinese culture, large male children are most valuable, making parents most hesitant to give them up. If a poor rural couple had multiple children and were poorly equipped to provide for them, they would be most willing to give up their daughters regardless of size or robustness, then thier smaller bodied son, and try to concentrate their resources to keep and raise their large-sized son. This causes deprivation of large male athletes in Chinese men's weighlifting. The second part is that as we go up weight classes, the athletes are larger, taller, and have wider armspans. This allows better control of the bar, which is 2.2 meters without variation. Larger lifters have more intuitive control of the bar because they can grip it wider, meaning that the difference between an athlete trained since childhood and an athlete trained since his teenage years is less pronounced due to the reduced technical difficulty. So while Chinese athletes may be in the heavy and superheavy class, the advantage they have over foreign athletes trained at older ages is less than that of thier lighter counterparts, making them less dominant. Regardless, China's Yang Zhe still holds the snatch world record in the men's 109kg heavy class.
