KEY POINTS:
It's the final night of the Olympic weightlifting, so what better place to be than the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Gymnasium.
The super-heavyweights, 105kg and over, but the biggest name in the division was missing.
Hossain Rezazadeh, known as the "Iranian Hercules", the world record-holder and
winner of the last two Olympic titles, has had trouble with his stomach - this is no surprise given what we're about to see - and reckoned he wasn't in good enough shape. Make what you will of that.
One element is missing; a local hero with whom the 6000 crowd could relate, so they settled into a neutral position and cheered and applauded them all.
Still, in any contest involving leaping or lifting, it gets no better than having the gold decided with the last act. And so it proved at the BUAA, as we aficionados know it.
Seven hefty lumps took to the stage - two Ukrainians, a Latvian, a Russian (are you detecting a common thread here?), a Pole, a German and a Korean.
The heaviest was the Korean Sangguen Jeon, a monstrous 155kg of wobbling flesh. Just to prove biggest isn't necessarily best, he found three different ways to drop the bar, ending with a backwards jelly roll to drop out before the second clean and jerk discipline even began.
When the first lifter appeared, he looked heavily pregnant. It then transpired they all did. The crowd greeted each lifter politely but warmed as the denouement approached.
Lifters have distinct styles. One squatted for an eternity before hoisting the bar. By contrast Artem Udachyn, one of the Ukrainians, arrived on stage with the air of a man disturbed at the dining table by a knock at the door.
He didn't look happy and simply walked up to the weight, bent down and raised it above his head before immediately returning to the dinner table ... er, the warm-up area.
Viktors Scerbatihs is a member of the Latvian parliament. His girth suggested he may have eaten a small family for lunch.
"Being a member of parliament and a weightlifter at the same time is almost incompatible," he said. "I don't even have a girlfriend." How that relates was unclear.
The PA announcer did his bit to stir the men up after they'd dropped a weight.
"All he needs is a little more concentration on the lift and he will be successful," the voice intoned with gravitas. Yes, Grasshopper.
The snatch is the first half of the event, where the lifter hauls the bar above his head in one sweeping movement. The clean and jerk has him getting it to his chin, pausing to gather himself, then shove it skywards.
Precision and balance is everything. Not easy for these unsmiling giants, you'd think, but most were surprisingly quick on their feet.
Eventually it boiled down to a three-way contest between the parliamentarian, a beefy Russian Evgeny Chigishev, who holds the world title for the jerk (a compliment by the way), and an excitable German Mattias Steiner, the youngest in the field at 26.
To cut to the chase, the parliamentarian took the lead, only to be cleaned out by Chigishev, who celebrated as if he'd nabbed the gold.
But the German had the last say. Steiner hefted 258kg to clinch the gold, to the delight of the German contingent. Whereupon he fell on the bar, hugged the weights, squashed his coach in a mighty hug and cavorted round the stage as the floor shuddered. He dedicated the gold to his wife who was killed in a car accident last year.
And as a superb string version of Deutschland uber Alles accompanied the raising of the flags, Steiner briefly looked set to lose it completely.
But big boys don't cry.
The Russian seemed happy, the parliamentarian kept sniffing his bouquet of flowers.
"I would like to say it is not the weak who lose, but the strong," he grumbled afterwards.
Grasshopper would approve.
