The Strongest Man in the World (2012)
The Strongest Man in the World
In the past five years, Shaw has added more than a hundred pounds to the svelte three hundred 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 ten 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 twelve hundred 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 ten-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 three-hundred-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.“Sir, please pull the vehicle over first.”Schwarzenegger had brought along two of his sons: Patrick, a slender, sandy-haired eighteen-year-old, and Christopher, a thickset fourteen-year-old. (It would prove to be a trying weekend for them. The following morning, in front of Veteran’s 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 teen-ager in Vienna, watching the Russian Yury Vlasov clean-and-jerk nearly five hundred 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.”The Arnold is an invitational event. Only the top ten strongmen are asked to attend, so most were nearly as big as Shaw. Hafbor Thor Björnsson, an Icelandic behemoth, came in glowering like a Viking, his head honed smooth and his jawline edged by a beard. At twenty-three, he was the youngest of the group but heir to a long line of champions from his island—a fact that he attributed to the springwater. “We are meant to be strong,” he told me. Zydrunas Savickas, a six-time winner from Lithuania, credited his strength to another fluid. “My mother work in milk factory,” he said. When Savickas was three years old, his grandmother found him in her back yard, building a fort out of cinder blocks. Now a baby-faced thirty-six, he was the sport’s elder statesman, voted the most popular athlete in Lithuania and a member of the Vilnius city council. “We have small country,” he said. “Every athlete like diamond in Lithuania.”There were five Americans in the group, three of whom were serious contenders. Derek Poundstone, from Waterbury, Connecticut, had won the contest in 2009 and 2010, and was the runner-up in 2008. He was the only man here with the chiselled, armor-plated look of a bodybuilder, and he liked to play up that fact with a crowd. (“At some point in the competition, I predict, Derek will tear his shirt off,” Jan Todd told me.) Mike Jenkins, an up-and-coming strongman from Hershey, Pennsylvania, had placed second to Shaw the year before. Six feet six and three hundred and ninety pounds, he had a sharp wit buried in the rubbery form of a Stretch Armstrong doll. “Sometimes people talk to me like they think that I might be mildly retarded,” he told me. “They hear that you lift rocks and pull trucks for a living, they don’t think Nobel Prize. But a lot of us are educated.” Jenkins had a master’s degree from James Madison University, and many of the others had bachelor’s degrees. Most of them had brought wives or girlfriends with them, as petite and straw-boned as their mates were gigantic.This year’s contest would stretch over two days and five events. Shaw was the odds-on favorite. He hadn’t lost a competition in more than a year, and had been setting personal records in training all winter. But his best event—the Manhood Stones—had been replaced by a barbell lift called Apollon’s Wheels. This played to Savickas’s greatest strength: his immensely powerful arms. “I have a lot of things left to prove,” Shaw told me later, in his hotel room. “Ideally, I’d like to walk away with the most championships ever. But Zydrunas, he’s tough, he’s strong, and I’m sure he’s hungry. He wants to prove that last year was a mistake. I want to prove the opposite.”Apollon’s Wheels were named for one of the great strongmen of the nineteenth century, Louis (Apollon) Uni. A Frenchman from the southern city of Marsillargues, Uni was visiting a junk yard in Paris one day when he came across a pair of spoked railway wheels that were perfect for his stage show. Mounted on a thick steel axle, they formed a barbell that weighed three hundred and sixty-seven pounds. Apart from Uni, only four men had ever managed to clean-and-jerk the device: Charles Rigoulot, in 1930; John Davis, in 1949; Norbert Schemansky, in 1954; and Mark Henry, in 2002. Todd’s version weighed almost a hundred pounds more. The strongmen, rather than jerk it overhead (the easiest part of the lift), had to raise it to their chest, flip it up to shoulder height, then drop it and repeat the lift as often as possible in ninety seconds.The strongman stage was at one end of the convention center, elevated above the crowd and flanked by enormous video screens. It was covered with black rubber matting and reinforced with steel beams—the contestants alone weighed close to four thousand pounds. As the strongmen trudged out one by one to attempt the lift, speed metal blasted overhead, and several thousand people whooped them on. But it was a discouraging start. On an ordinary barbell, the grip spins freely, so the plates don’t move as they’re being lifted. But these railway wheels were screwed tight to the axle. The men had to rotate them around as they lifted—murder on the arms and shoulders—then keep them from rolling out of their hands. Dealing with this, while holding on to the two-inch-thick axle, required an awkward grip: one hand over and the other hand under. “Even now, most of the men in our contest can’t clean it,” Todd said.Travis Ortmayer, a strongman from Texas, took a pass and dropped to the bottom of the ranking. Two British strongmen, Terry Hollands and Laurence Shahlaei, managed one lift each, while Jenkins, Poundstone, and the Russian Mikhail Koklyaev did two. The surprise of the contest was Mike Burke, one of Shaw’s protégés from Colorado, who lifted the wheels three times, his face bulging like an overripe tomato. Then came Savickas. He’d put on considerable weight in recent years, most of which had gone to his gut—a sturdy protuberance on which he liked to rest the barbell between lifts. When he’d raised it to his shoulders three times in less than a minute, he took a little breather, like a traveller setting down a suitcase, then casually lofted up a fourth.Shaw had done as many or more in training, in the thin air of his gym at five thousand feet. But this time, when he brought the bar up to his chest, something seemed to catch in his left arm. He repositioned his hands, dipped down at the knees, and flipped the weight up beneath his chin. But it didn’t look right. “I don’t know what happened,” he told me later. “The warmups felt really good, and the weight felt light off the ground. But when I went up . . . it’s a hard feeling to describe. Almost like electrical shocks—like three different shocks in a row.”Afterward, Shaw reached over to touch his arm. By the time I found him backstage, the situation was clear: he had “tweaked” his left biceps. The strange shocks were from strands of tendon snapping loose, rolling up inside his arm like broken rubber bands.Injuries, sometimes devastating, are almost intrinsic to strongman contests: the inevitable product of extreme weight and sudden motion. In 1977, at the first World’s Strongest Man competition, one of the leaders in the early rounds was Franco Columbu, a former Mr. Olympia from Sardinia who weighed only a hundred and eighty-two pounds—a hundred less than his closest competitor. Columbu might have gone on to win, had the next event not been the Refrigerator Race. This involved strapping a four-hundred-pound appliance, weighted with lead shot, onto your back and scuttling across a lot at Universal Studios. Within a few yards, Columbu’s left leg crumpled beneath him. “It was at an L,” he told me. “All the ligaments were torn, and the calf muscle and the hamstring, and the front patella went to the back.” The injury required seven hours of surgery and threatened to cripple Columbu for life, but he came back to win the Mr. Olympia title again in 1981. (He later settled a lawsuit against the World’s Strongest Man for eight hundred thousand dollars.)The Arnold has a somewhat better track record—“We’ve never had anyone hurt so bad that they had to be carried away,” Todd told me—but its strongmen are a battle-scarred lot. “Man, you can almost go down the list,” Shaw said. Ortmayer had ripped a pectoral muscle, and Poundstone had fractured his back. One man had damaged his shoulder while lifting the Hammer of Strength, and others had torn hamstrings and trapezius muscles. “In strongman, everybody injured,” Savickas told me. “For us, stop just when it’s broken totally—joints, bones, or muscles.” In 2001, at a strongman contest on the Faeroe Islands, Savickas slipped on some sand while turning Conan’s Wheel and tore the patella tendons off both knees. “I can’t walk,” he recalled. “I am laying down. Everybody says that I can’t back. But I back—and won.”Shaw’s injury was a small thing by comparison. But there were four events left, each of which would put a terrible strain on what remained of his left biceps. “It’s wide open now,” Mark Henry, the former Arnold champion and a judge at the contest, told me between rounds. “I think Brian’s going to have to withdraw. It’s like your daddy probably told you: if the stove’s hot, don’t touch it.”Ten minutes later, Shaw was back onstage. Using his right arm only, he proceeded to lift a two-hundred-and-fifty-five-pound circus dumbbell above his head five times. “I was hoping to do eight or nine,” he told me afterward. “My left arm is really stronger than my right.” Even so, he took second place in the event—bested only by Jenkins, who did seven lifts—and was now within striking distance of the over-all lead. But how long would his arm hold out?Strength like Shaw’s is hard to explain. Yes, he has big muscles, and strength tends to vary in proportion to muscle mass. But exceptions are easy to find. Pound for pound, the strongest girl in the world may be Naomi Kutin, a ten-year-old from Fair Lawn, New Jersey, who weighs only ninety-nine pounds but can squat and deadlift more than twice that much. John Brzenk, perhaps the greatest arm wrestler of all time, is famous for pinning opponents twice his size—his nickname is the Giant Crusher. And I remember, as a boy, being a little puzzled by the fact that the best weight lifter in the world—Vasily Alexeyev, a Russian, who broke eighty world records and won gold medals at the Munich and the Montreal Olympics—looked like the neighborhood plumber. Shaggy shoulders, flaccid arms, pendulous gut: what made him so strong?“Power is strength divided by time,” John Ivy, a physiologist at the University of Texas, told me. “The person that can generate the force the fastest will be the most powerful.” This depends in part on what you were born with: the best weight lifters have muscles with far more fast-twitch fibres, which provide explosive strength, than slow-twitch fibres, which provide endurance. How and where those muscles are attached also matters: the longer the lever, the stronger the limb. But the biggest variable is what’s known as “recruitment”: how many fibres can you activate at once? A muscle is like a slave galley, with countless rowers pulling separately toward the same goal. Synchronizing that effort requires years of training and the right “neural hookup,” Ivy said. Those who master it can lift far above their weight. Max Sick, a great early-nineteenth-century German strongman, had such complete muscle control that he could make the various groups twitch in time to music. He was only five feet four and a hundred and forty-five pounds, yet he could take a man forty pounds heavier, press him in the air sixteen times with one hand, and hold a mug of beer in the other without spilling it.“It’s a terrific space, Tony—but do you think a TV will fit?”The convention center was full of people searching for a shortcut to such strength, and venders trying to convince them that they’d found it. There were seven hundred booths in all, staffed by muscle-bound men and balloon-breasted women, handing out samples with complicated ingredients but simple names: Monster Milk, Devil’s Juice, Hemo Rage, Xtreme Shock. “That’s the fastest-acting testosterone booster on the market,” Ryan Keller, the marketing director for Mutant, a maker of “experimental muscle modifiers,” told me, pointing to a product called Mutant Test. “Then there’s Mutant Pump. It’s for the hard-core guys.” Mutant Pump contains a proprietary compound called Hyperox, which pushes the body’s nitric-oxide production “past all previous limits,” according to its marketing material. This allows the muscles to stay pumped full of blood long after a workout. “You can stop lifting, get in your car, and it’s still working,” Keller said. “Some guys say it almost hurts, it gets so hard.” Shaw uses a similar supplement, called Dark Rage, designed to increase his red-blood-cell count. “When he drinks it, he gets excited and does this little dance,” his girlfriend told me.Here and there among the salespeople were a few who claimed to be doing damage control. I talked to an insurance agent who said that her firm had a strong “appetite” for extreme sports. When I asked if she would indemnify a strongman, she frowned. “Probably not,” she said. “We do mixed martial arts, but if they have a fifty-per-cent loss ratio we aren’t going to do it.” A few aisles over, I met Tom O’Connor, a physician from Hartford, who called himself the Metabolic Doc. A longtime weight lifter, O’Connor was in the business of treating muscle dysmorphia—a kind of reverse anorexia. The condition is often marked by obsessive bodybuilding, abetted by anabolic steroids. “It’s an absolute epidemic!” O’Connor told me, leaning in so close that I could see his pupils dilate and sweat bead on his forehead. “The men come to me broken and hurt. They come to me with cardiac problems and libido problems and erectile dysfunction.” His solution: low-dose hormone-replacement therapy. The sign above his booth read, “Got Testosterone?”