Featherweight (≤60 kilograms), Men

François “Frans” De Haes won the only gold medal for Belgium in weightlifting at the 1920 Olympics. De Haes is described well by Roland Renson in his book, The Games Reborn: The VIIth Olympiad Antwerp 1920, “Frans De Haes (1895-1923) was a typical son of the Antwerp sporting proletariat. ‘This true child of Antwerp, this unbastardized sinjoor, as Sport-Revue (1920, 2(11) of 21 September: 171) liked to call him, had fled with his parents to the neutral Netherlands in order to escape the Germany occupation. At the age of 17, he started weight-lifting in Holland under the guidance of Henri Borstlap, who had been trained himself by the famous Antwerp wrestler, Laurent Gerstmans. He joined the Amsterdamse Vereeniging der Halters and reached the standards of Dutch champion Eyman. He joined the Gerstmans Worstelclub, founded in 1919, when he returned to Antwerp after the war and bettered all three Belgian records in the feather-weight class. . . . He was preparing for the Games of 1924 when this ‘working class hero’ was struck down by influenza and died at the end of May 1923 … ”