Qatar's Fares El-Bakh aims to cement weightlifting legacy at Paris Olympics

Tokyo Games gold medalist faces biggest challenge from China’s Liu Huanhua in 102-kg category

Qatar's Fares El-Bakh won gold in the men's 96kg weightlifting division at the Tokyo Olympics. AFP

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For an athlete as open and sharing as Meso Hassona, there’s an unusual degree of mystery trailing him onto centre stage on the penultimate day of the Olympic Games.

Hassona, who competes under his given name Fares El-Bakh, is attempting to become Qatar’s most decorated Olympian, to add another gold to his first place in the men’s weightlifting from Tokyo three summers ago. But the key question, the stimulus to rivals led by China’s Liu Huanhua in the 102-kg category, is how fit and close to his peak the charismatic Qatari is after injury disrupted his build-up to the Games.

Fares has reported that the problems he suffered with a hip muscle in April are in the past and that Team Meso, the close family unit that channels the wisdom and confidence of generations of weightlifting excellence into the 26-year-old heir to their dynasty, are confidence of a golden performance in the south of Paris. That by the end of Saturday, Fares will be up there, with his beaming smile, at least on one of the higher steps of the podium.

Success would make history for Qatar, which has been Fares’s home through his professional rise in the sport, and for Egypt, where he was born and from where 40 summers ago his father Ibrahim El-Bakh himself first set off for an Olympics.

Ibrahim finished a respectable fifth, wearing the vest of Egypt, in those Los Angeles Games and counted two further Olympic adventures to his career honours by the time he retired to coach and settle into the demands of fatherhood.

“It’s family business,” Fares told Torokhtiy Media shortly before departing his Rome training camp for Paris. Famously so. Preparations have long been carefully overseen by his father and brother, who has also competed in the sport. There’s more. Fares’s grandfather was also a weightlifter of distinction; and the name Meso, bequeathed to him as a boy, is a daily heirloom, remembering others from a family tree full of strongmen.

A story Fares likes to tell is that, at around the age of 14, when he was showing an enthusiasm for lifting, an elastic flex in his elbows and the musculature for this most taxing of events, Ibrahim forecast a timeline that would have young Fares at his third Olympics by the year 2024.

He was accurate. As a teenager Fares went to Rio de Janeiro and finished seventh in the 85kg category at his debut Games. By the age of 20 he was the owner of junior world records at 96kg, and beginning to be known as the ‘Clean-and-Jerk King’ for his excellence in that branch of the two disciplines of competitive lifting.

He would set a fresh Olympic record for the clean and jerk - and the overall total - in that weight category in claiming his Tokyo gold.

But up among the 102kg giants, where Fares’ ambitions now lie, China’s Liu has been setting new benchmarks. At the International Weightlifting Federation’s World Cup in April, where injury prevented Fares from competing, Liu’s 232kg clean-and-jerk lift rewrote the record books.

Liu is the man to beat on Saturday, by which time China will almost certainly have accumulated what has become their standard, ample tally of medals across the weightlifting sections.

But Fares would be the heavyweight lifter many neutrals lean to. He’s a crowd favourite, with his evident joy in what he calls the “performance buzz”, the camera-friendly demeanour he brings to a sport that is growing, particularly in the Mena region and which, at elite level, is anxious to move on from historic issues with athletes’ doping.

After Fares’ first Games, the podium in his category would be retrospectively adjusted after the third-placed Gabriel Sincraian was stripped of his bronze medal for testing positive for excess testosterone.

Fares meanwhile presents as the wholesome, human and passionate face of the sport. “We’re not just robots who lift weights,” he told Dune magazine. He’s marketable, mischievous at times and with a flair for the challenge. “You have to risk,” he said of the aggressive push to higher targets that, some observers suggested, had contributed to his injury in the spring. “Without risk, you never gain, and you’ll never improve.”

Come the weekend, he anticipates “a really nice battle” with Liu and against a range of of high-calibre contenders in his category, among whom Armenia’s Garik Karapetyan and Akbar Djuraev, from Uzbekistan are also tipped for medals.

As ever, the aim is “to make the family proud.” And the legacy? “I want to be remembered as a guy who gets up on the stage with a smile, and who made it to the top.”