Iran Ends With 8 Medals in Rio

EghtesadOnline: With eight medals at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, Iran was ranked 25th in the final medal standings table.

News ID: ۷۳۶۱۵۲

23 August 2016

Participating in the games with a total of 64 athletes in 15 sports fields, Iran won three gold, one silver and four bronze medals in four different fields, Mehr News Agency reported.

The Rio games were the second best performance of Iranian athletes in the 17 editions of the Olympics that it has attended. Iran has taken part in the games since 1900.

The country's top performance was in the previous round of the games in London, 2012, where Iran won four gold medals, marking the highest number of gold for the country in the games, which together with the five silver and three bronze, fetched a total of 12 medals, the highest in all the editions.

Preparing for Rio, expectations were high from the previous medal winners plus younger talents who had proved their potential by shining in different world competitions.

Iran had many favorites in freestyle and Greco Roman wrestling, weightlifting, taekwondo, archery, table tennis, track and field, rowing and shooting. However it managed to win only in the first four of these categories, according to Financial Tribune.

Iran’s weightlifting squad clinched two gold medals by Kianoush Rostami (85 kg) and Sohrab Moradi (94 kg). Rostami also beat the world record by one kilogram.

Also, Iranian wrestler Hassan Yazdani won the finals of Men's freestyle 74 kg over his Russian rival to add one more gold medal to Iran’s tally.

Lone Silver

Iran’s only silver medal was won by heavyweight wrestler Komeil Ghasemi who conceded a defeat against his Russian rival in the finals of the Men's freestyle 125 kg wrestling event. Ghasemi now holds the record of winning the most number of Olympic medals in Iran's freestyle wrestling as he also won a bronze in the previous edition.

Saeid Abdevali (75 kg) and Ghasem Rezaei (98 kg) were Iranian Greco-Roman wrestlers who stood third on the podium while Hassan Rahimi also won a bronze medal in 57 kg division of freestyle wrestling. Rezaei was the only medal winner from London 2012 who repeated his success this time too by winning a bronze.

The fourth bronze medal was won by Kimia Alizadeh in -57 kg class of taekwondo who became the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal.

Although he did not win a medal, heavy weightlifter Behdad Salimi broke the world and Olympics record of snatch weightlifting in the Men's +105 kg class.

In fencing, Mojtaba Abedini finished fourth and marked the best rank for Iran in 116 years of presence in the Olympics.

In Men's 100m athletics, Hassan Taftian set a record of 10.17 seconds and qualified for the semi-finals. Although he did not win  a medal, he was named Iran's fastest man in the Olympics and the first Iranian to reach that level.

The national volleyball team which experienced their first ever presence in the Olympic Games had a fine performance qualifying from the preliminary round to the quarterfinal stage where they were overpowered by Italy - which later finished second and won silver. They gained two victories over Cuba and Egypt and lost to Poland in a close encounter.

The 2016 Olympics were held in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, August 5-21. The next edition will be in Tokyo in 2020.