The latest addition to its Olympic medal collection came courtesy of double world champion Rafael Alba.

Alba entered the postponed Tokyo 2020 Games as third seed and world champion in the men's over-80 kilograms heavyweight category, but suffered a shock 11-8 defeat in his first bout against Dejan Georgievski.

The North Macedonian, seeded 14th, went on to earn silver, losing 15-9 in the final to Vladislav Larin of the Russian Olympic Committee.

Alba, meanwhile, had to pick himself up and contemplate his route forward to a place on the podium.

An 8-2 win over the Ivory Coast's Seydou Gbane in the first round of the repechage took him into one of the bronze medal matches, where he defeated China's Sun Hongyi 5-4.

Alba will carry his Olympic ambitions on to the Paris 2024 Games.

He first hit the heights as a 19-year-old, earning world gold at the 2013 World Championships in Puebla, Mexico, in the men's under-87kg middleweight class.

By the time he got to the 2019 World Championships in Manchester, Alba was contesting the heavyweight class - and he dominated it.

To earn his first world gold in 2013, he beat China's Ma Zhaoyong 4-2. Six years later he reached the middle step of the podium in Manchester with a 9-5 win over Mexico's Carlos Sansores.

In his semi-final, Alba had disposed of Brazil's Rio 2016 bronze medallist Maicon Andrade. Alba's own progress at those Olympics was halted in the quarter-finals when he met Uzbekistan's 2015 world champion Dmitriy Shokin, who progressed on superiority after the score had been tied at 1-1.

Those 2015 world finals at Chelyabinsk in Russia had seen Alba's defence of his middleweight title earn him another medal - bronze this time after he had been beaten 7-6 in the semi-final by eventual gold medallist Radik Isayev of Azerbaijan.

Later that year, Alba had taken the Pan American Games title, beating Columbia's Carlos Rivas 11-4 in the final.

But at the season's concluding Grand Prix final in Manchester, he was frustrated in the final as he lost 2-1 to the man who would beat him at the following year's Olympics - Shokin.

The 2017 World Championships in Muju saw Alba beaten in the round of 32.

After regaining the world title he earned silver at the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, losing 13-6 in the final to Jonathan Healy of the United States.

And before coronavirus lockdown halted competition, he secured his place at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games by winning the Pan American Olympic qualifier in Heredia, Costa Rica, beating Healy 30-6 in the final.

He was heading towards the Olympic podium.