All but a few were elite coaches and every one of them, from 32 nations, signed up to a scheme that can help weightlifting in its efforts to regain its place on the Olympic Games programme.

When weightlifting, along with boxing and modern pentathlon, was told 16 months ago that it was off the Games programme for Los Angeles 2028, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach warned “a change of culture” was needed before any prospect of a return could be considered.

The pilot launch of an international coaching licence scheme in Halmstad, at the headquarters of the equipment manufacturer Eleiko, is weightlifting’s latest example of culture change.

A final version will need to be drawn up after a pilot period, which must be cleared by lawyers and approved by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) Executive Board before being written into a new Constitution in September.

It is expected to have a profound effect.

Coaches will take far more responsibility for doping violations, National Federations will likewise take more responsibility for their coaches, and in future the IWF hopes it will lead to a cleaner sport.

When the licensing scheme is up and running after the Paris Olympic Games "we will no longer have coaches appearing from nowhere," said Colin Buckley, chair of the European Weightlifting Federation (EWF) Coaching and Research Committee.

"We will be able to see who is registered, who is accredited, who is starting out on the coaching journey," said Buckley, from Ireland, programme manager for the scheme being piloted by the EWF for the IWF.

“If you don’t have the support of your Federation you will not be able to coach in international weightlifting."

The scheme will be used on a pilot basis for the first time at the European Championships in Armenia next month, when sign-up will be requested but not mandatory, and again at the European Junior and Under-23 Championships in July.

The IWF’s plan, said its Coaching and Research Committee chair Petr Krol, is to put it into full effect in 2025.

"The licence is not just a piece of paper, it’s a sign of feeling for our sport, support for our sport," said Krol.

"We have to do everything we can to be at Los Angeles 2028 and I’m sure this activity will help us."

Buckley, who has been working on a licence scheme for 14 years and is finally seeing it come to fruition after knockbacks from the IWF’s previous leadership, explained, "The three main aims of the project are to protect the integrity of our sport, protect clean athletes, and help weightlifting to stay in the Olympic Games.

"Under the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) Code it is mandatory for the IWF, as a signatory, to provide effective education.

"The National Federations must ensure that the coach does that, and the message will be 'start clean and stay clean'."

Another benefit for the IWF could be saving money - lots of it.

It will generate income as well as save it but, Krol said, licence fees will be kept low.

The IWF’s bill for catching cheats in the Olympic cycle is $12 million (£10 million/€11 million), or 40 per cent of its income, general secretary Antonio Urso told his audience of coaches in Halmstad.

"That money is going on anti-doping rather than development," he said.

Showing his optimism that the IOC will restore weightlifting’s place, Urso said, "My dream is to cut 40 per cent of this spending after Paris [2024] and 80 per cent after Los Angeles [2028].

"Education is the way to beat doping, a new culture is the way, not always expensive testing."

The message from the International Testing Agency (ITA), which carries out all anti-doping procedures for the IWF, came in an address by its education specialist Mairi Irvine, who said, "A young athlete’s first experience of anti-doping should be education, not doping control."

Which is where the coach comes in, because they will be expected to provide that education.

To make things clear, Buckley highlighted the definition of education as far as WADA is concerned: “To raise awareness, inform, communicate, to instil values, develop life learning skills and decision-making capability to prevent intentional and unintentional anti-doping rule violations.”

The licence will not be all about anti-doping, said Buckley: it will ensure that all licensed coaches reach minimum standards – "just like they do in football, rugby, judo and other sports from which we have learned in drawing up the programme" – and it will provide a coaching pathway.

"We can no longer just assume a coach has a certain level of knowledge and competence," he said.

"It will no longer be just about what coaches need to know, it will be about what they must do.

"This is a very big step for national federations to say yes, we take responsibility, yes we play our part in taking our sport in a new direction."

Buckley stressed that nobody can earn a licence without the backing of their National Federation, which they will need to retain over time because the accreditation will be renewable every Olympic cycle.

If a coach wants to leave his or her home Federation to work for another, the new employer will be responsible for doing the “due diligence” on their new employee.

National Federations will be required to name an athlete’s personal or club coach at the preliminary entry stage for international competitions and, said Buckley, if an athlete rapidly improved a best lift by 20 or 50 kilograms the coach will come under as much focus as the lifter.

A database of all coaches will be compiled, including from National Championships, and will grow over time so that all their records can be followed.

“We need the documentary evidence so we can prove to the IOC that we are trying to protect the athlete,” said Buckley, who believes that banning teenagers for doping offences when the coach goes unpunished is grossly unfair.

“We have a duty of care to protect athletes.”

Until recently no coaches had appeared on the IWF’s list of doping-related sanctions, which goes back to 2003, but the ITA has imposed life bans on three coaches in the past 18 months, one of whom won an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Krol and his IWF Committee will work on defining the minimum standards and other details, and both he and Buckley are hoping for extensive feedback from coaches during this year’s pilot period in Europe.

They were both bombarded with questions from the audience in Halmstad, on regulations in the warm-up room, whether athletes can help out with coaching, how many coaches are allowed at a competition and so on, and the message from Krol was, "Keep the questions coming, keep the opinions coming because we are still at the pilot stage and working on the details."

There will be four levels of accreditation and initially the programme will start at the top down with international coaches and work down to those at senior, club, and entry level.

Coaches will have to educate themselves and undergo tests to earn their qualification.

Urso claimed that yesterday’s seminar on the coaching licence was "an historic day for weightlifting".

It was a clear sign of the “change of culture” demanded by the IOC, he said, as were the recent or ongoing policies on refugees, transgender weightlifters, athlete scholarships and a strengthening of the deal with the ITA.

Urso cited significant improvements in governance, communications (the IWF recently appointed a media officer, Pedro Adrega), science (more than 30,000 weightlifting-related articles on the pubmed health-related online platform), and anti-doping.

The IWF has agreed to pay the ITA an extra $400,000 (£330,000/€375,000) for more out-of-competition testing, more investigations and more educational seminars.

Tougher testing, often based on intelligence, has led to four medallists from the last Olympic Games testing positive since standing on the podium in Tokyo, Igor Son from Kazakhstan, Anton Pliesnoi from Georgia, Zacarias Bonnat from Dominican Republic and the triple Olympic champion Lu Xiaojun from China.

That fact alone is enough to prevent anybody at the IWF becoming complacent.

“The IOC is impressed with what we have done but it wants us to clean weightlifting and we must do more before September,” said Urso.

The key to crystallising the improvements will be adopting a new constitution in the days before the IWF World Championships begin in Riyadh on September 2, he said.