The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (32 page)

By the time he'd gone back and forth across the gym, his face had puffed up like a blowfish, and the tendons stood out from his neck. When he bent over to catch his breath, he saw that his inner thighs were chafed an angry red. “Wait till you see what it looks like a couple of days from now,” one of the other lifters said. “It just chews up your legs.”

“I hate the Duck Walk.”

“You're mentally weak.”

For a long time, strongmen didn't bother with specialized training. When CBS televised the first World's Strongest Man contest from Universal Studios, in 1977, the competitors all came from other sports. There were bodybuilders like Lou Ferrigno, football players like Robert Young, and weight lifters like Bruce Wilhelm, who won the contest. Even later, when the dilettantes had mostly dropped out of contention, there was no standardized equipment. Shaw had to cast his own Manhood Stones from a plastic mold, and he practiced the Keg Toss in his parents' backyard, in a large sandpit that they'd built for volleyball. “Even 10 or 12 years ago, you wouldn't have had a place like this,” he told me at his gym. “But a guy can't just come in off the street anymore and be amazing.” These days, most of Shaw's equipment is custom-forged by a local company called Redd Iron; his diet and his workout clothes are subsidized by his sponsor, the supplement maker MHP—short for Maximum Human Performance.

“I see guys accomplish things that are just blowing my mind,” Dennis Rogers, a grip master in the tradition of Thomas Inch, told me. Although the lifts vary from contest to contest, the most popular strongman events and records are now well established, and the latest feats circulate instantly on YouTube. “The weights they're moving, the dead lifts they're doing, the things they carry—it wasn't until 1953 that the first 500-pound bench press was done,” Rogers said. “Today, you have guys who are doing a thousand pounds. How much can the human body take?”

 

The urge to perform feats of strength for no good reason seems to be deeply embedded in the male psyche. Shaw's Manhood Stones are just modern versions of the thousand-pound volcanic boulder unearthed on the Greek island of Santorini. It was etched with a boast from the sixth century
B.C
.:
EUMASTAS, SON OF KRITOBOLOS, LIFTED ME FROM THE GROUND
. Similar accounts crop up in countless early histories and anthropological studies. The Vikings tossed logs, the Scots threw sheaves of straw, the ancestors of the Inuit are rumored to have carried walruses around. Even a man as brilliant as Leonardo da Vinci felt the need to bend horseshoes and iron door knockers, just to show that he could.

By the 19th century, men like Thomas Topham, Louis Cyr, and a succession of German Goliaths had turned such feats into lucrative theater. Topham, an English fireplug who was five feet ten and weighed 200 pounds, could bend iron pokers with his bare hands, roll pewter dishes into cannoli, and win a tug-of-war with a horse. According to a playbill from 1736, cited in David Willoughby's classic history,
The Super-Athletes
, Topham's act included the following feats: “He lays the back Part of his Head on one Chair, and his Heels on another, and suffers four corpulent men to stand on his Body and heaves them up and down. At the same time, with Pleasure, he heaves up a large Table of Six Foot long by the Strength of his Teeth, with half a hundred Weight hanging at the farthest end; and dances two corpulent Men, one in each Arm, and snaps his fingers all the time.”

The World's Strongest Man was a title of cheap coinage in those days: no circus ever made a shilling claiming to have the second strongest. Still, like other athletic skills, it eventually ceded to a stricter accounting. Equipment was standardized, rules established. The debatable merits of bouncing four fat men on your belly—because how fat were they, really, and how high did they bounce?—gave way to a pair of uniform and highly regulated lifts: the snatch and the clean and jerk. In the first, a barbell is gripped with both hands, thrown into the air, and held above the head in a single motion. In the second, the weight is swiftly lifted to the shoulders (the clean), then flipped up and caught overhead (the jerk). Carrying cows was left to amateurs.

Olympic weight lifting made its debut at the first modern Games, in Greece, in 1896. But it wasn't until 1920, when weight classes were created, and 1928, when one-hand lifts were abolished, that it settled into a predictable sport. Americans were soon the dominant power. Under the savvy sponsorship of Bob Hoffman, the founder of the York Barbell Company, in Pennsylvania, the national team produced a succession of gold medalists in the 1940s and 1950s, including Tommy Kono, John Davis, and Paul Anderson. Early on, to get around rules restricting Olympic participation to amateurs, Hoffman would hire the lifters at his factory for as little as $10 a week and let them train on-site. They would also promote York products in
Strength and Health
—the house organ, “edited in an atmosphere of perspiration and horseplay,” as
Fortune
put it in 1946.

“Bob took a bunch of nobodies and turned them into the greatest team in the world,” Arthur Drechsler, the chair of USA Weightlifting, told me recently. To Drechsler, a former junior national champion, Olympic weight lifting remains the finest test of strength ever devised. “This thing was created to cut through all the BS,” he told me. “Are you the best or not? Let's see. Let's do two events and we'll see who's really good. Everyone lifts the bar from the same place; everyone is competing at the same level. We haven't discriminated by race, creed, or color since the 1920s. So we have a legitimate claim to having the strongest people in the world.”

The awkward part, for Drechsler, is that this elite no longer includes Americans. Since 1960, the United States has suffered through an extended drought in the sport. Bulgarians, Hungarians, Cubans, Poles, Romanians, Koreans, an East German, and a Finn have all topped the podium, and Russians and Chinese have done so dozens of times. (Weight lifting, with its multiple weight classes, is an ideal means of amassing medals, they've found.) But aside from Tara Nott—a flyweight from Texas who won her division in 2000, when women's weight lifting was introduced at the Sydney Games—no American has won the gold. This year, the men's team didn't even qualify for the Olympics. (One American, Kendrick Farris, later qualified individually.)

It's this void that the strongmen have helped to fill. Like the rise of NASCAR over Formula One, professional wrestling over boxing, and
Jersey Shore
over
The Sopranos
, the return of men like Shaw seems to signal a shift in our appetites—a hunger for rougher, more outlandish thrills and ruder challenges. A modern strongman has to have explosive strength as well as raw power, Shaw told me, but most of all he has to be willing to lift almost anything, anywhere. “I'm a fan of functional strength,” he said. “If you're the strongest man on the planet, you ought to be able to pick up a stone or flip a tire. Those Olympic lifters—how can you call someone the strongest man if he can't walk over to a car and pick it up?”

 

Early in March, I went to see Shaw defend his title at the Arnold Strongman Classic, the heaviest competition of its kind in the world. The Classic is held every year in Columbus, Ohio, as part of a sports festival that was founded by Arnold Schwarzenegger and a promoter named Jim Lorimer, in 1989. Like its namesake, the festival is a hybrid beast—part sporting event and part sideshow—that has ballooned to unprecedented size. It's now billed as the largest athletic festival in the world, with 18,000 competitors in 45 categories. (The London Olympics will have 10,500 athletes in 26 sports.) Lorimer calls it Strength Heaven.

At the Greater Columbus Convention Center, that Friday morning, the main hall felt like a circus tent. Black belts in judo tumbled next to archers, arm wrestlers, and Bulgarian hand-balancers. A thousand ballroom dancers mixed with more than 4,000 cheerleaders. In the atrium, a group of oil painters were dabbing furiously at canvases, vying to produce a gold-medal-winning sports portrait. The only unifying theme seemed to be competition, in any form; the only problem was telling the athletes from the audience. A hundred and seventy-five thousand visitors were expected at the festival that weekend, and half of them seemed to be bodybuilders. In the main hall, they made their way from booth to booth, chewing on protein bars and stocking up on free samples.
YES, I CAN LIFT HEAVY THINGS
, one T-shirt read.
NO, I WON'T HELP YOU MOVE
.

Up the street, at the hotel where most of the strongmen were staying, the breakfast buffet was provisioned like a bomb shelter. One side was lined with steel troughs filled with bacon, potatoes, scrambled eggs, and pancakes. The other side held specialty rations: boiled pasta and rubbery egg whites, white rice, brown rice, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. This was “clean food,” as strength athletes call it—protein and carbohydrates unadulterated by fat or flavoring. The most competitive bodybuilders eliminate virtually all liquids and salt from their diet in the final days of the contest, to get rid of the water beneath their skin and give their muscles the maximum “cut.” “What do you think I'm doing here, having fun?” I heard one man shout into his cell phone in the lobby. “This is work. This isn't playing around. My dad died, and I was lifting weights three days later. What am I supposed to do, go home and drop everything to take care of my girlfriend?”

If bodybuilders were the ascetics of the festival, the strongmen were its mead-swigging friars, lumbering by with plates piled high. “It's a March of the Elephants kind of thing,” Terry Todd told me. “You expect that music to start playing in the background.” Todd and his wife, Jan, have designed the lifts and overseen the judging at the Arnold since 2002. (Like Terry, Jan works at the University of Texas and had an illustrious athletic career: in 1977, she was profiled by
Sports Illustrated
as “the world's strongest woman.”) They take unabashed delight in the strongmen and their feats, but as educators and advocates for their sport they have found themselves in an increasingly troubling position. The Arnold, like most strongmen contests, doesn't test for performance-enhancing drugs, and it's widely assumed that most of the top competitors take them. (In 2004, when Mariusz Pudzianowski, the dominant strongman at the time, was asked when he'd last taken anabolic steroids, he answered, “What time is it now?”) The result has been an unending drive for more muscle and mass—an arms race unlimited by weight class.

“It's a little frightening,” Todd told me. “The strength gains dictate that we make the weights higher, but at what point does the shoulder start to separate, or the wrist, or you get a compression fracture? We really don't know how strong people can be.” Gaining weight has become an occupational necessity for strongmen. The things they lift are so inhumanly heavy that they have no choice but to turn their bodies into massive counterweights. “Centrifugal force is the killer,” Mark Henry, a professional wrestler and one of the greatest of former Arnold champions, told me. “Once the weight starts to move, it's not going to stop.” Fat is a strongman's shock absorber, like the bumper on a Volkswagen—his belly's buffer against the weights that continually slam into it. “I wouldn't want to be too lean,” Shaw said. When I asked about steroids, he hesitated, then said that he preferred not to talk about them. “I really do wish that there was more drug testing,” he added. “I would be the first one in line.” The same is true for most of the strongmen, Todd told me, but they feel that they have little choice: “You don't want to take a knife to a gunfight.”

In the past five years, Shaw has added more than 100 pounds to the svelte 300 that he weighed at his first contest. “It gets old, it really does,” he said. “Sometimes you're not hungry, but you have to eat anyway. Training is easy compared to that.” Pudzianowski once told an interviewer that his typical breakfast consisted of 10 eggs and two to three pounds of bacon. “Between meals, I eat lots of candy,” he said. Shaw prefers to eat smaller portions every two hours or so, for maximum absorption, supplemented by “gainer shakes” of concentrated protein. (“His one shake is 1,200 calories,” his girlfriend, a former model for Abercrombie & Fitch, told me. “That's my intake for the entire day.”) Until he renewed his driver's license last year, Shaw often got hassled at airports: the guards couldn't recognize his 10-year-old picture because his face had fleshed out so much. “He's grown into his ears,” one of his lifting partners, Andy Shaddeau, told me. “Those were not 300-pound ears.”

 

On the night before the contest, the strongmen were summoned to the convention center for a private audience with Schwarzenegger. I could see them scanning the room for potential hazards as they filed in. The downside of being a giant is that nothing is built to your scale or structural requirements: ceilings loom, seams split, furniture collapses beneath you. “You only have to hit your head a few times before you start to watch out,” Shaw told me. “Going into a restaurant, I have to look at the chairs and make sure that they don't have arms on them or I won't fit.” When Shaw went shopping for a Hummer recently, he couldn't squeeze into the driver's seat, so he bought a Chevrolet Silverado pickup instead and had the central console ripped out and moved back. Even so, he has trouble reaching across his chest to get the seat belt.

Schwarzenegger had brought along two of his sons: Patrick, a slender, sandy-haired 18-year-old, and Christopher, a thickset 14-year-old. (It would prove to be a trying weekend for them. The following morning, in front of Veterans Memorial Auditorium, the city unveiled an eight-and-a-half-foot bronze statue of their father, while a heckler shouted from the crowd, “Hey, Arnold! How are your wife and kids? Been cheating on your wife today, Arnold?”) Both boys were great fans of the strongmen—“They're my favorites by far!” Patrick told me. As they sat in the audience, their father talked about being a teenager in Vienna, watching the Russian Yury Vlasov clean-and-jerk nearly 500 pounds. “It was so impressive that I went home and started training,” he said. “Instead of an hour a day, I did two hours a day, and then three hours a day.” Years later, Schwarzenegger said, he was happy to be crowned the most muscular man in the world. But he was “at the same time very angry” because he knew that others could lift more. “So I am, of course, a big admirer of yours,” he said. “You are the real strongest men in the world. I thank you for your training and I thank you for being so powerful.”