That victory for 19-year-old Bratu at 89 kilograms and a silver at 96kg today, along with a series of impressive performances by the senior World Championship bronze medallist Marin Robu, 20, have been the top achievements on the platform for Moldova in the past three years.

But, given how mired in doping Moldovan weightlifting was until five years ago, by far its best achievement has been "zero doping", says Antonio Conflitti.

In his roles as president of Moldova’s National Federation (WFRM), President of the European Weightlifting Federation and a member of the IWF Executive Board, Conflitti is an outspoken critic of the doping culture that has done so much damage to the sport.

Four Moldovans have been banned for life from weightlifting since 2006, one of them a doctor who used "doppelgangers" to provide samples for Moldovan athletes, and who featured in the 2020 German TV documentary that exposed corruption in the sport.

Back in 2011, in a report on the IWF website looking ahead to that year’s World Championships in Paris, Moldova’s national coach at the time, Gheorghe Gutu, spoke highly of four athletes.

Three were the Dudoglo brothers, Iuri, Ghenadie and Alexandru, and the fourth was Cristina Iovu, who was "very exhausted" by her training.

Between them the brothers have been banned for doping five times, one of them for life, another for cheating at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and the third after testing positive at the 2015 IWF World Championships.

Iovu, who moved on from Moldova to Azerbaijan - for a fee - and later Romania, is a world record-holder in weightlifting - the only athlete to have been banned three times while competing for three different countries.

Moldova was one of the nations suspended for a year in 2017 for having three or more athletes test positive when stored samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games were reanalysed.

When Conflitti took charge of the WFRM, first as Interim President in February 2019, the organisation was close to collapse.

Two athletes had tested positive at the 2017 European Championships in Split - the last in-competition doping cases for Moldova –-and fines for those cases plus a mountain of historic cases, plus huge legal fees for appeals that failed, caused a crisis.

The Moldovan Sports Ministry said "no more money" and the WFRM President, the 1992 Olympic champion Tudor Casapu, resigned.

Conflitti, vice-president at the time, informed the Executive Board that he would not stay permanently unless he was given the power to start a war on doping.

"Sometimes you have to make strong decisions, to be the alpha male," he said.

"I was not against democracy but I wanted to be in control to enforce a zero-doping policy, to decide who stays and who goes."

He was seen by some as an outsider, having moved to Moldova from his native Italy, where he worked in sport and a Government role, to set up a successful business.

But the Board agreed, and Conflitti’s actions, from sacking coaches and athletes to using the IWF’s new Constitution as a template for internal reforms, are changing the weightlifting culture in Moldova.

Only one member of the senior national team was retained, and all those serving suspensions - there were plenty - were told, "You can go wherever you like in the world but you will never represent Moldova again."

Because of that decision no Moldovan older than 20, realistically, is a genuine medal prospect in senior international weightlifting.

That is the cost of changing your weightlifting culture.

The national team coach had colluded in sample-swapping, Conflitti knew from his own investigation to support a long-running appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which was dropped when he found out about it.

"After that I started to look with different eyes at what was going on, but I was new, I was from another country with a different culture.

"In a former Soviet Union country it’s not easy to establish trust and understand what happened in past.

"The first thing I did when I became President was to say goodbye to the coach."

Other coaches who had encouraged their athletes to dope were dismissed, losing jobs, pensions and social standing, which made it a challenge winning the support of the coaching community.

At a meeting of coaches he told them, "What do you need?

"More training camps, more vitamins and legal supplements, a good nutrition programme… I will find the money and do it.

"But first positive case and you are out, no second chance.

"You the coaches are much more guilty than the athletes.

"Don’t tell me you don’t know - athletes do nothing without the coach telling them.

"No apologies, no 'it was a mistake', one doping case and you are out."

Coaches for international events are chosen on an ad hoc basis, depending on the athletes selected, and there is no national head coach.

"I want to see a real change of culture before we choose a national coach," said Conflitti.

Because Bratu was seen as a good medal prospect in Crete, his personal coach travelled with him.

The new landscape meant that "the juniors became the senior team" and achieving results would take a while.

"We were competing in international senior events, world and Europe, with juniors," Conflitti refects.

Now the athletes have a voice in the way weightlifting is governed in Moldova.

Only recently, the WFRM created an Athletes' Commission with voting rights, whose members will be elected at the forthcoming National Junior Championships.

There is also an entirely independent commission to deal with disciplinary decisions and - should they return - doping problems.

It is chaired by a judge and features a senior official from the National Anti-Doping Organisation (NADO), with which the WFRM has built a close cooperation.

The WFRM's new Constitution also features specific points regarding fair play and doping concerning coaches, where they will take personal responsibility "if something goes wrong".

Other changes were necessary because of a change in the law in Moldova concerning not-for-profit organisations.

"Sometimes with sponsorship, sometimes with personal money we have made progress," said Conflitti.

"We started a new cooperation with the NADO, started collecting samples at national competitions.

"Slowly I became more popular in the federation and athletes would come to me and say they were not sure about this young athlete, maybe they are taking something.

"Even if these athletes were not going to be international weightlifters we tested because you have to solve the problem at the very beginning, not when you are in the national team.

"Some coaches would withdraw, some athletes would withdraw… you could then see who did not like the new culture in the federation."

There was no team from Moldova at the IWF Youth World Championships last year and there will be none in Mexico later this year, as the rebuilding takes time.

"They are still too young, so we will try first to have some youth athletes in the top 10 in Europe," said Conflitti.

"But I am seeing a change… we are losing less athletes than before [because of the demands of training] from the youth generation."

After today’s 96kg category, in which Bratu finished 6kg behind the 370kg posted by the Armenian Garik Karapetyan, Conflitti said, "Tudor is just coming, he is the next generation.

"For three years Marin [Robu] has shown his talent with good results, and with the use of social media he has attracted new interest in weightlifting among young people.

"Weightlifting has become more popular.

"Attention in the past, in the media, was more about problems than results.

"When we started to get good results in recent years we saw comments like 'OK, let’s see when this medal will be withdrawn'.

"The mentality of ordinary people was that after one year a medal would be withdrawn because of doping.

"But now the feelings around us have changed, because we haven’t had doping problems."