Olivia Reeves ensured the United States won a fifth successive gold at the IWF Junior World Championships in Tashkent ©USA Weightlifting

Olivia Reeves ensured the United States won gold at the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) Junior World Championships for the fifth time in a row.

Reeves, 18, has been on the podium at all three of her international competitions, as a youth, a senior and now as a junior world champion at 71 kilograms in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Both the other two, the 2019 Youth World Championships in Las Vegas, where she was second, and her victory at the Rogue Challenge at last year’s Arnold Festival in Columbus, were on home soil.

Reeves, whose sister Haley is also a talented weightlifter, looked as happy as anybody all week as she celebrated with her coach Steve Fauer and the USA Weightlifting performance director Pyrros Dimas.

The winning run on total for the US started in 2016 when CJ Cummings won the first of his four straight junior world titles, and also featured a gold in 2019 for Kate Nye as the Americans finished top of the women’s team standings and second in the men's.

Reeves is the daughter of a CrossFit gym owner in Chattanooga, Tennessee and started as an all-round CrossFit athlete before discovering: "I like lifting weights a lot better than CrossFit."

She was one kilogram behind the home nation’s Kumushkhon Fayzullaeva after the snatch but made up the difference comfortably to win with 102-127-229, a career best.

Reeves celebrates making the podium for her third successive international competition ©USA Weightlifting
Reeves celebrates making the podium for her third successive international competition ©USA Weightlifting

Fayzullaeva was second on 225kg and the Russian challenger Evgeniia Guseva missed her final two clean and jerk attempts to finish on 222kg, thereby becoming Russia’s fourth bronze medallist of the week.

The US has four more female A Group lifters in the 76kg, 81kg and 87kg later in the week.

Uzbekistan completed a good day when Mukhammadkodir Toshtemirov won the men’s 81kg with 161-182-343.

The busy 19-year-old was making his 14th international appearance in four years, quite an achievement given that so much of that time was "dead" because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Toshtemirov, a silver medallist at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, finished 16kg clear of the Armenian Karen Margaryan, with fellow Uzbek Khokiakbar Olimov third, a further 1kg behind.

The result meant that the hosts finished the day, which featured just those two finals, with a gold, a silver and a bronze.