The Deadlift World Record Is Coming to the Center of the Sports Universe

Tek

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Many people would describe Hafthor Bjornsson as a mountain of a man even if he hadn’t played a character called The Mountain on Game of Thrones. Standing a smidge under 7 feet tall and weighing more than 400 pounds, he takes up the space usually required for three humans. In 2014, when Bjornsson was clocking in at a wimpy 390-something, The New York Times compared him to a refrigerator. And if you thought he was towering as Gregor Clegane, well, he’s a lot bigger now.

It’s been nearly a year since The Mountain fell from the Red Keep; these days, Bjornsson is making news at his day job. On Saturday, he’ll be on ESPN, attempting to pull 1,104 pounds (or for context: about five of the aforementioned refrigerators, or one adolescent elephant, or two-thirds of a smart car) off the ground and up to his waist. More precisely, Bjornsson will try to break the deadlift world record, a four-year-old mark set at 500 kilograms by the British strongman Eddie Hall.

The deadlift is sometimes called the “King of Lifts,” both because it is extraordinarily taxing and easy to understand. Though the average lifter is taught to focus acutely on proper technique and only deadlift about once a week to avoid injury, the exercise’s appeal is universal: Everybody knows what it feels like to lift something off the ground. And 501 kilograms is a whole lot of something.

In normal times, Bjornsson’s attempt wouldn’t have a dedicated window of prominent airtime; just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that people want to watch it. Strength sports have a niche audience better served by YouTube and Twitch than cable television. Nevertheless, The Mountain will be live on ESPN at noon ET, with a 30-minute block of coverage focusing on his feat of strength. Will sports fans tune in … or care?

There has been a fascination with strength for as long as there have been humans. An advantaged party is still known as a Goliath; the strength of Hercules has been portrayed both in a Disney cartoon and a 2014 live-action movie starring Dwayne Johnson. Beginner lifting programs and modern strongman competitions often reference the myth of Milo of Croton, a man who may or may not have lived about 2,500 years ago and trained for the ancient Olympics by walking around with a growing calf on his back. And in 2015, when Bjornsson carried a 640-kilogram log for five steps, he did it to break a record set only in legend: The viking Orm Storolfsson is said to have carried the mast of a ship for three steps before breaking his back.

Feats of strengths are part mythology and part circus act—for the 19th and much of the 20th century, strongmen traveled with promoters performing impressive but strange feats, like driving a nail through a board or biting a coin in half. There was no uniform strength competition, however, until the creation of Olympic weightlifting in 1896. Even then, the kinks in that competition weren’t worked out until about 40 years later.

Paul Anderson, the American who claimed to be the strongest man in the world in 1950s and ’60s, won Olympic weightlifting gold at the 1956 games before giving up his amateur status to tour the country doing his own act; he lifted dumbbells and squatted with the weight of eight audience members on his back while a comedian prattled on as his emcee. These feats contributed to Anderson’s fame, but a lack of standardization led to grating questioning and a constant demand for proof. Anderson would lift dumbbells over his head, and after his show an audience member would come on stage, lift the weight, and suggest that it wasn’t so heavy. “I can’t understand that,” Anderson told The New Yorker in 1969. “When a violinist gets through with a concert, nobody comes up and starts playing his violin.”

Eventually a competition would emerge: The first World’s Strongest Man (WSM) was held in 1977 at Universal Studios and aired on CBS. It had similar vibes to UFC 1, with haphazardly designed events that drew competitors from the worlds of bodybuilding, football, weightlifting, and hammer throwing. One competitor was a professional stuntman. Lou Ferrigno, Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding foil in the documentary Pumping Iron and the actor who played The Hulk in a pre-CGI world, was there too.

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I wonder if there is a stronger animal than human. An animal that can deadlift more.
 

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