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| Event type

Middleweight (≤77 kilograms), Men

Date10 August 2016 — 10:00 (B) (A)
StatusOlympic
LocationRiocentro Pavilhão 2, Parque Olímpico da Barra, Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro
Participants14 from 13 countries
FormatTotal of best lifts in snatch and clean & jerk determined placement. Ties broken by lightest bodyweight.

With only 14 athletes entered in this weight class, anything could happen. However, the nod had to go to the reigning Olympic, and three-time World champion, Lu Xiaojun of China, despite failing to register a total at the 2015 World Championships, when he won the snatch. Egypt’s Mohamed Ihab, the silver medalist at the last two World Championships, and known for big lifts near the end of a competition, was also fighting for a medal, as was the Kazakhstan’s Nidzhat Rakhimov, the former Azerbaijani, who had just returned from a two-year doping ban.

With three lifters tied in first place in the snatch at 165 kg, Andranik Karapetyan of Armenia and Lu broke that up with 170 kg + lifts. Lu then broke his own three-year-old snatch world record of 176 kg by lifting 1 kg more. That took him into the clean & jerk with a lead of 3 kg. It appeared the 77 kg gold medal was Lu’s to lose after Karapetyan suffered a ghastly arm injury on his second attempt at the clean & jerk. Rakhimov, who was 12 kg behind when Lu finished his lifts, surprisingly stole the gold medal, but it took a world record lift of 214 kg, and tied Lu on 379 kg, but the Kazakhstan lifter took the gold medal by virtue of his lighter body weight.

Upon winning bronze, Ihab, one of six weightlifting brothers, was the first Egyptian to win an Olympic medal in this middleweight class since 1936, when countryman Khadr El-Touni won gold at the Berlin Games.

Side note: Kazakhstan, who lost five Olympic titles from 2008 and 2012 through retrospective doping positives, was only allowed to compete because their outstanding doping cases were not fully processed in time for the 2016 Games. And that was how the results seem to end. However, in March 2022, after re-test if samples from Rio, it was announced that the gold medalist Nidzhat Rakhimov (of Kazakhstan) had tampered with his urine specimens and swapped his specimen for another clean one. He was disqualified and lost his gold medal. As of 22 March 2022 no medal advancements have been announced yet.

PosGroupLifterNOCWeightBodyweightSnatchClean & Jerk
1Lu XiaojunCHN37976.83177 (1)202 (1)WRSilver
2Mohamed IhabEGY36176.69165 (4)196 (2)Bronze
3Chatuphum ChinnawongTHA35676.52165 (3)191 (5)
4Alexandru ȘpacMDA34776.52155 (6)192 (3)
5Andrés CaicedoCOL34676.26155 (5)191 (4)
6Andrés MataESP34376.32153 (7)190 (6)
7Choe Jon-WiPRK34376.54153 (8)190 (7)
8Ibrahim AbdelbakiEGY33876.90152 (9)186 (8)
9Nico MüllerGER33276.70151 (10)181 (9)
10Sathish Kumar SivalingamIND32976.96148 (11)181 (10)
11 DeniINA32369.38146 (12)177 (11)
DNFDumitru CaptariROU76.68145 (13)
DNFAndranik KarapetyanARM76.75174 (2)– (NVL)
DQNidzhat RakhimovKAZ[379][76.19][165] (DQ)[214] (DQ)1