LONDON (AP) — Ilya Ilyin of Kazakhstan shattered clean and jerk and total weight world records Saturday to become the first weightlifter in London to defend an Olympic gold medal from Beijing.
Buoyed by an ecstatic crowd inside the ExCeL center’s weightlifting arena, Ilyin lifted 233 kilograms in his final clean and jerk for a world record in that discipline.
His total of 418 kilograms beat the pre-competition world record from 1999 by a whopping six kilograms.
Alexandr Ivanov of Russia got the silver medal, and Anatoli Ciricu of Moldova took bronze.
Ukraine’s Artem Ivanov never showed up for the weigh-in. He told Ukrainian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda he was injured three weeks before the Olympics.
