The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (33 page)

The Arnold is an invitational event. Only the top 10 strongmen are asked to attend, so most were nearly as big as Shaw. Hafþór “Thor” Björnsson, an Icelandic behemoth, came in glowering like a Viking, his head honed smooth and his jawline edged by a beard. At 23, 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. Žydru-nas 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 backyard, building a fort out of cinder blocks. Now a baby-faced 36, 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 chiseled, 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 390 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 But his best event—the Manhood Stones—had been replaced by a barbell lift called Apollon's Wheels.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 Žydru-nas, 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 19th century, Louis “Apollon” Uni. A Frenchman from the southern city of Marsillargues, Uni was visiting a junkyard 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 367 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 100 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 90 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 4,000 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 traveler 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 5,000 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 warm-ups 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 182 pounds—100 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 400-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 $800,000.)

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 255-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 overall 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 10-year-old from Fair Lawn, New Jersey, who weighs only 99 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 80 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 fibers, which provide explosive strength, than slow-twitch fibers, 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 fibers 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-19th-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 145 pounds, yet he could take a man 40 pounds heavier, press him in the air 16 times with one hand, and hold a mug of beer in the other without spilling it.

The convention center was full of people searching for a shortcut to such strength, and vendors trying to convince them that they'd found it. There were 700 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 50 percent 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?

It was tempting, to a flabby outsider like me, to dismiss all this as anomalous—an extreme subculture. But to athletes it was the new normal. “Are you kidding me?” O'Connor said. “Have you seen what's happening around here? It's never going to end.” When I asked Jim Lorimer, the cofounder of the festival, what he thought about rising steroid use, he called it a “knotty problem.” Then he told me a story. In 1970, when he brought the world weight-lifting championships to Columbus, the event was a bust at first. “We were at Ohio State University, at Mershon Auditorium, and the first three days—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—it was empty. Maybe a few family members.” Then, on the third day, a scandal broke: eight of the nine top lifters tested positive for steroids. “Well, that Thursday evening Mershon filled up,” Lorimer recalled. “Friday, Saturday, Sunday—it was filled every day. Now, what lesson do you think I learned from that?”

The bigger the body, the bigger the draw. When it comes to steroids, public censure and private acceptance have tended to rise in parallel. In 1998, after Mark McGwire admitted to doping while setting his home-run record, he was attacked in the press and later blackballed from the Hall of Fame. But sales of steroids skyrocketed. Eight years earlier, George H. W. Bush had both criminalized the use of steroids and appointed Arnold Schwarzenegger—the world's most famous steroid user—chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. “It's like an oxymoron,” a strongman said. “Arnold is the poster boy. But if you got into a private conversation, do you really think he'd say, ‘I never should have done that'? Of course he would have done it! He's a movie star and a millionaire because of it. He was governor of California! He could never have done any of that without it.”