Who is Ivan Ivanov the weightlifter?

A Bulgarian weightlifter born in Shumen on 27 August 1971. He won four world championships and took Olympic gold in the flyweight division at Barcelona in 1992 with a record clean and jerk of 150 kg. He later coached, and was appointed national selector in 2011.

Why was his Sydney medal taken away?

He finished second in the 56 kg category at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney but failed a doping test, returning a positive result for the banned diuretic furosemide, and was disqualified. The silver was withdrawn.

Is 27 August a public holiday in Bulgaria?

No. Galabovo and Dalgopol both hold their town day on 27 August, but those are local celebrations rather than national holidays. This year it falls on a Thursday and everything else runs as normal.

On This Day in Bulgaria: Shumen's Olympic Champion Ivan Ivanov (27 August), Shumen.UK

📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 27 August

The man who won Bulgaria an Olympic gold medal in Barcelona learned to lift in a school gym about ten minutes from where I am typing this. Ivan Ivanov was born in Shumen on 27 August 1971, and the city took until 2021 to make him an honorary citizen, which is a very Bulgarian sort of thank you.

What happened on this day

Ivanov started weightlifting in 1984 at the sports school here in Shumen, under a coach named Veliko Velikov, and the results came early: junior world titles, then four senior world championships in 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1993. The International Weightlifting Federation named him the best weightlifter in the world in 1989 and again in 1990, which is the kind of billing that makes an Olympic final feel like a formality.

It nearly was not. He went to Barcelona in 1992 as the heavy favourite, three times reigning world champion and world record holder in the clean and jerk, and after the snatch he was sitting second, beaten into the lead position by nothing more than bodyweight: 0.1 of a kilogram heavier than Lin Qisheng. Then he clean and jerked 150 kg, an Olympic record, and took the gold. What followed is the part Bulgarians will tell you without being asked. Sixth at Atlanta in 1996 in a reshuffled weight class, then a silver at Sydney in 2000 that was taken off him after he tested positive for the banned diuretic furosemide. He went into coaching afterwards, worked in Croatia, was made national selector in 2011, and in 2019 the sports ministry named him the country's best coach, jointly with the rhythmic gymnastics coach Vesela Dimitrova.

Towns celebrating today

Гълъбово (GUH-la-bo-vo) marks its day down in the Upper Thracian Plain, and its name comes from гълъб, the Bulgarian for dove, which is a soft name for a hard-working place: this is lignite country, the coal and electricity belt, with the Maritsa Iztok-1 power station on its doorstep and just over six thousand people living there. A fair slice of the electricity behind your air conditioning this month was made within sight of the town called Dove.

Дългопол (dul-go-POL), seventy kilometres west of Varna in the Varbitsa Balkan and set above the Tsonevo reservoir, has the better party trick. It was plain Novo Selo until it was renamed in 1934, and only became a town in 1969, but there is a glacier on Smith Island in the South Shetlands, deep in the Antarctic, that carries its name. Bulgaria has been quietly putting its village names on the map at the bottom of the world for years, and Dalgopol is on that map.

Why this matters for British expats

Weightlifting is to Bulgaria roughly what Olympic rowing and track cycling are to Britain: a sport a small country got very good at, cares about out of all proportion, and can still name the medallists from. That is worth knowing, because if you mention Barcelona to a Bulgarian man of a certain age you will not be talking about the football. It is also worth knowing that the doping chapter gets told alongside the gold rather than buried, which tells you something about how sport is discussed here. If you live in Shumen, the useful line is that our Olympic champion came out of the sports school, and if you want to try the name of today's other celebrant, our Bulgarian phrasebook will get your mouth round it.

Sources and further reading

Ivanov's career, from that first session in 1984 to the council vote that made him an honorary citizen of Shumen, is set out on his Bulgarian Wikipedia page, with the English entry carrying the lift-by-lift account of the Barcelona final. The two towns celebrating today have their own Wikipedia entries, and Dalgopol's is where you will find the Antarctic footnote.