Bantamweight (≤56 kilograms), Men

Turkey’s Halil Mutlu had won the 1996 Olympic flyweight gold medal and came to Sydney as a heavy favorite, having won the last three World Championships. He broke the world record in both snatch and clean & jerk and, consequently, in the total to win his second gold medal with a world record of 305.0 kg. Mutlu, formerly Huben Hubenov in his birth nation of Bulgaria, would return in 2004 and win his third consecutive gold medal, again as a bantamweight. Behind him, China’s Wu Wenxiong and Zhang Xiangxiang won the silver and bronze medals, respectively. Initially, Bulgaria’s Ivan Ivankov appeared to place second but he was disqualified after testing positive for Lasix (furosemide), a powerful diuretic often used as a masking agent to enable athletes to evade doping positives.