If that sounds remarkable in its own right, it is only half the story.

The 91-year-old still bears the scar of a murderous attack by a fellow weightlifter who knived Tchobanian on the streets of Baghdad and then tried to shoot him.

Tchobanian, who has lived in California for nearly half a century but is better known - as "Baba Harry" - throughout the Arab weightlifting world, will never forget that day in 1954 when he escaped death but his friend was killed in the attack.

"Baba Harry", a Christian whose Armenian parents had fled the genocide in Turkey to settle first in Lebanon, where he was born in 1931, and then Iraq, had made the mistake of beating the wrong man when he won his fourth straight national championship.

"He was a captain in the Baghdad police, Kadem Abdukha, and he was trouble," said Tchobanian.

"He said if you win, I want to kill you.

"A few days later, I was going to the cinema when three people came towards me, near a Minister’s house that had police protection.

"They had butcher’s knives and guns. One of them was a weightlifter I trained with, another was Kadem Abdukha.

"He tried to kill me in the middle of Baghdad.

"I had a friend with me who was also a butcher - he said ‘If any of them comes for you, I’ll kill him.'

"One of them put me up against a wall, another attacked my friend, and I took a knife in my back from Kadem Abdukha."

At this point Tchobanian pulled up his shirt and showed the large scar from that attack 68 years ago.

"One of them killed my friend," he said.

"I was hit, I slipped and he (Abdukha) was going to plunge his knife in my heart.

"I was on the ground, kicked out, he fell, I ran.

"I was covered in blood and screaming, a policeman in front of the Minister’s house shot his gun in the air and everyone ran away.

"The chasers were shooting at me - they all had guns from the police department.

"They were a gang, like the mafia, but they worked for the police.

"I saw a taxi, jumped in, the driver took me to hospital."

Tchobanian was unconscious for weeks.

"Everyone said I would die, but I recovered two to three months later and soon I was training again… but sometimes I still have trouble with my breathing," he said.

"When I complained to the police they knew all about it, they just said, ‘Forget about staying.’

"In May of 1954 my dad sent me to Lebanon - I was born there and my family moved to Iraq when I was five".

Tchobanian was the featherweight national champion in Lebanon several times, setting records that would stand for 14 years and posting a career-best total, in the days of the press, of 345 kilograms.

He competed at the International Weightlifting Federation World Championships twice in the 1950s, won medals at the Arab Championships and Mediterranean Games, lifted at a major invitational event in the Soviet Union and competed against one of his all-time favourite lifters, the Soviet Olympic champion Rafael Chimishkyan.

He suffered the disappointment of missing the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956 because of a boycott by Lebanon, which was protesting against British and French involvement in the Suez Crisis.

"I qualified for Rome in 1960 too, but I left the sport because I had no financial support from the Lebanese Government".

When he gave up on the Rome Olympics, Tchobanian also gave up on the life of an athlete, and on Lebanon - eventually becoming a successful accountant many years later in the United States.

Having worked as a physical education teacher at the University of Tripoli, he returned to Iraq, disillusioned that the promise of a better job for the Lebanese Government had never been honoured.

His life was no longer under threat from Abdukha because of what had happened at the second Pan Arab Games hosted by Lebanon in 1957.

"He was lifting against me, the man who had tried to kill me," he said.

"I won and he had won some medals too.

"I was with some Armenian friends who said ‘Harry, what this guy did to you, we will do to him.’ They all had pistols and wanted to kill him.

"They captured Abdukha in Beirut, put him in a car and took him to a piece of parkland about half an hour from the city.

"They put a pistol to his head… he pleaded, ‘Please don’t let them kill me, I am sorry, I have a family, forgive me for what I did to you.'

"I could not allow them to kill him."

Only a few weeks later the two met again at the World Championships in Tehran, Iran, where Abdukha beat Tchobanian by 2.5 kilograms.

Iran played quite a part in Tchobanian’s life.

His first coach was Jafar Salmasi, Iran’s first Olympic medallist in any sport who was born, lived and coached in Baghdad until Saddam Hussein took power.

Salmasi moved his family to Tehran, where he died in 2000.

It was in the same city that Tchobanian, by chance, became an IWF technical official when there was a shortage of referees at the 1965 World Championships, where he was coaching.

He was given a test and recruited on the spot.

The first of his many passbooks, issued more than 57 years ago and detailing his appointments at competitions around the world, remains one of his most treasured possessions.

Tchobanian has officiated at Olympic Games, World Championships and other competitions in all continents over the decades, including the Asian Championships and West Asian Championships in Bahrain and Qatar in the past three months.

His daughter, Nora, also attached to the Lebanon Federation despite living in California, is an IWF duty doctor at competitions worldwide.

Tchobanian, who married his childhood sweetheart Shakeh in 1960, might have been killed in the 1970s when, for a second time, he came under gunfire - this time from the Israeli Air Force.

He had to leave Iraq for a second time in 1970 when political instability and harassment forced him and his family to return to Lebanon, where they stayed until they emigrated to the US in 1975.

During those years in Lebanon he worked as senior accountant for an import-export company and also oversaw deliveries - the most troublesome of which involved Bulgarian cheese.

In 1973, when he was travelling with truckloads of cheese via Turkey and Syria, Israeli warplanes attacked the convoy.

He escaped then, and decided to leave when he thought he had seen his son gunned down in the street in Beirut, only to discover it was another boy.

There was more trouble in 2017 when, while Tchobanian was away officiating, his house in Glendale burned down because of a wiring fault.

He rebuilt it, including a gym where he still does exercises in his nineties.

During all this, Tchobanian never lost touch with his Armenian roots.

He helped with the funding to rebuild a school in Armenia in 2005, and brokered a deal in 2008 that helped Armenians based in Iran to train at a weightlifting centre in Tehran.

He is an honorary vice-president of the Armenian Weightlifting Federation, and was an Executive Board member of the Asian Weightlifting Federation for 12 years until 2014.

"I was nearly killed because I beat a guy at weightlifting," Tchobanian said in Doha.

"But weightlifting has been my life… I had trouble but I had good times, and I still love to see young people enjoying the sport."