Bantamweight (≤56 kilograms), Men

Soviet Aleksey Vakhonin came in as the favorite after winning the 1963 World Championship in this class. Japan’s Yoshinobu Miyake was World Champion in 1962 and had won the silver medal at Rome, but he moved up to the featherweight class in Tokyo. In the press, Hungary’s Imre Földi took the lead over Vakhonin, 115.0 to 110.0 kg. Földi continued to lead after the snatch but Vakhonin moved up 2.5 kg. Vakhonin was able to win the gold medal with a lift that should have been a world record in the clean & jerk (142.5 kg), but by then he was overweight for the class so it counted only as an Olympic record. This gave him a world record total of 357.5 and the gold medal, with Földi taking silver.

Vakhonin went on to win multiple international titles but never competed again at the Olympics, as he was removed from the Soviet team prior to the 1968 Olympics for “conduct unbecoming a Master of Sport.” Imre Földi had one of the great careers of any weightlifter in the 1960s. He competed at five Olympics (1960-76), winning silver medals in this class in 1964-68 and a gold medal in 1972, and won the 1965 World Championship and four European Championships (1963, 1968, 1970-71). At the end of the 20th century, he was voted the second greatest weightlifter of all-time in several polls, trailing Turkey’s Naim Suleymanoğlu.