Half-Heavyweight (≤100 kilograms), Men

The defending champion was Mongolian Naidanqiin Tüvshinbayar, who was back but was expected to be challenged by the 2011 World Champion, Russian Tagir Khaybulayev, while the top seed was Kazakh Maksim Rakov, but he went out in the first round. Khaybulayev had high-level support as Russian President Vladimir Putin, a judo enthusiast and practitioner, came to watch the matches on this day and root for Khaybulayev. In the semi-final, Khaybulayev met German Dimitri Peters and was expected to win easily, but there was no score in regulation or extra time and he advanced to the final only by hantei (judges’ decision). In the other half of the draw Naidan won his first few matches by ippon, until the semi-final when he defeated Hwang Hui-Tae (KOR) by yuko.

The final was not close. Tüvshinbayar had been injured in the semi-final and Khaybulayev had an easy time of it, winning with a shoulder drop for ippon at 2:14 into the match. This did make Tüvshinbayar the first Mongolian to win two Olympic medals. Peters won one of the bronze medals, while the other went to Dutch judoka Henk Grol, who had won a bronze at Beijing in this class and was World silver medalist in 2010.