When it comes to any fitness or athletic challenge, the accuracy of your sights matters. The 100m running course must be precisely measured, archery targets must be exactly as far apart as the event states they are and that Olympic bumper plates are the weight their colour designates.

The discs themselves, all of which are colour-coded according to the standards of the International Weightlifting Federation, must be made to extremely precise tolerances of 10g in weight and 1mm in diameter.

Both the size and weight precision are important due to the effects not only of slightly more mass pressing down on a competition weightlifter but also the power of weight distribution, which can be the difference between success and failure at the highest level of competition.

However, whilst most important for competitive athletes, it is also useful for any weightlifters to know that whatever targets they reach in one gym or with one set of plates they can reach with another. This is why imprecise plates often have corrections written on them in permanent marker.

Possibly the ultimate example of this precision mattering is one of the closest top-level weightlifting contests in recent history, one that proved so controversial that a weightlifter was banned for life by the end of it.

Such A Beautiful Horizon

The 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona was famous for many reasons, not least its exceptionally popular theme song by Freddie Mercury and opera singer Montserrat Caballe, although he tragically would not live long enough to sing it at the Opening Ceremony.

The weightlifting event was the last undertaken under a set of ten weight classes that had lasted since 1980, but of the different events, by far the closest was the light-heavyweight event contested by athletes weighing at or below 82.5kg.

However, what made the event somewhat unique was that all three of the top-ranked competitors lifted the same total weight, with Pyrros Dimas of Greece, Krzysztof Siemion of Poland and Ibragim Samadov of the Unified Team (formerly the USSR) all lifting the same total weight when their snatch and clean-and-jerk lifts were combined.

This led to a reliance on two tiebreakers to determine the ultimate winner between the three who had scored a total of 370 kg between their two highest lifts.

This served to add controversy to what had already been a rather controversial light-heavyweight event.

Mr Samadov was a last-minute replacement for the Unified Team, allegedly selected over Turkmenistan’s Altymyrat Orazdurdyyew due to being Russian, the same nationality as coach Vasily Alekseyev, under the assumption that it would be a guaranteed gold medal.

The tiebreaker positions were decided by the body weight of the lifter and, if that was not enough to determine a winner, which athlete reached their competition total fastest. The latter rule had only been officially enacted in 1992 but was an evolution of the informal rule that “whoever lifts it first wins the tiebreaker”.

This meant that Mr Dimas won after successfully lifting 202.5 kg in his first clean-and-jerk lift and by being lighter than Mr Samadov, Mr Siemion claimed silver, relegating Mr Samadov to third.

This was also controversial, although the logic as a tiebreaker is that laying a benchmark is slightly more difficult than meeting or beating it from a psychological standpoint.

Tiebreakers are not entirely uncommon, according to a study in the Eastern Economic Journal, 46 weightlifting medals were awarded by tiebreakers from 1976 up until 2004, discounting the boycott-stricken 1980 Games in Moscow, with 27 of the 58 tournaments in that sample decided via tiebreaker.

Irrespective of how the competition reached this point, Mr Dimas won what was considered at the time to be a stunning upset, given that Greece had not won a weightlifting medal of any kind since Perikles Kakousis won gold in the Two Hand Lift at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, Missouri.

Mr Dimas would go on to win two more gold medals and a bronze, making him one of the most decorated weightlifters in Olympic history.

Mr Siemion’s silver medal was also seen as an upset, given that he had placed fifth at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and would place fourth at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

As for Mr Samadov, the last controversial moment would be on the podium itself. As Mr Dimas emphatically celebrated his medal win and Mr Siemion celebrated his finest achievement as an athlete, Mr Samarov dropped his bronze medal, rejecting it and walking off the stage.

This would lead to him being disqualified, and banned for life by both the International Olympic Committee and the IWF, meaning that his career was over the second he stopped off of the rostrum.

Only precise weightlifting plates could have allowed such a dramatic and close competition to take place.