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.
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?”
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 co-founder 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 performance-enhancing drugs. * “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.”
Late one afternoon, when the thumping soundtrack in the main hall was giving me a headache, I ducked into one of the side rooms to watch the women’s Olympic weight-lifting trials. The crowd here was a fraction of the size of the one outside, and the atmosphere was almost monastic by comparison. During the lifts, the room would go completely quiet—no whoops or catcalls, just the deep silence of absolute concentration. The athletes, too, seemed to be of a different species from the strongmen: flexible and surprisingly slender, with muscles that had the almost slack look I remembered in Alexeyev. There was a terrific fierceness about them—some would stamp their feet and let out a shriek before grasping the bar—but its focus was inward. The best female lifters can toss the equivalent of two very large men above their heads in a single motion. It’s the closest that humans come to being superheroes, and these women acted accordingly.
“Weight lifting is fifty per cent mental and thirty per cent technique,” Tommy Kono, among the greatest of all American lifters and a spectator in the crowd that day, told me during a break. “Power is only twenty per cent, but everybody has it reversed.” Kono was a prime example of the miraculous change that weight lifting can effect. A Japanese-American from Sacramento, he was a spindly twelve-year-old in 1942, when his family was relocated to an internment camp at Tule Lake, in Northern California. “The name is a misnomer, really,” Kono said. “It was the bottom of a dried-up lake. When the wind blew, it really kicked up a sandstorm, but the dry air helped my asthmatic condition.” It was there, in another boy’s house, that Kono discovered weight lifting and began to train in secret. (His parents didn’t think his body could handle it.) By the time his family was released, in 1945, he had put on ten or fifteen pounds of muscle. By 1952, he was the Olympic gold medalist as a lightweight. He went on to win another gold as a light heavyweight, and a silver as a middleweight.
Kono blamed the decline in American lifting on an influx of foreign coaches. “They brought in the European idea of training five or six days a week, twice a day,” he said. “Instead of being athletes, they became like workers. Rather than improving, they started getting injuries and overtraining. Even the South American countries started passing us up.” This women’s team was an exception. Unlike the men, they’d qualified for two spots at the Olympics. The best athletes were in the middleweight classes: Amanda Sandoval and Rizelyx Rivera, at fifty-eight kilos, and Natalie Burgener, at sixty-nine. But the competition at those weights was so stiff overseas that the heaviest lifters were more likely to get the spots. (At the trials, all that mattered was how your lifts compared with those of others in your weight class worldwide.) And so, once again, Lorimer’s rule held true: the bigger the body, the bigger the draw. To judge by the cheering between lifts, most of the crowd was there to see Holley Mangold.
Mangold was something of a local celebrity. Born and reared in Dayton, she had played football in high school, on the offensive line, and come within a point of winning a state championship. (Her older brother, Nick, is an All-Pro center with the New York Jets.) Although she’d come late to lifting, Mangold had quickly climbed the ranks and was threatening to supplant the country’s top super-heavyweight, Sarah Robles. “My little girl is all about pure power,” her father, Vern, told me. Five feet eight and well over three hundred pounds, Mangold was astonishingly quick and flexible for her size—she could drop into the full splits with ease. “I’m a huge girl,” she said to me. “I’ve always been huge. At three hundred and fifty pounds, I feel sluggish. But at three hundred and thirty I feel like I can conquer the world.”
In the end, Mangold and Robles both made the Olympic team—Mangold winning the clean and jerk, Robles the snatch. But their lifts were well short of medal contention. To Mangold’s coach, Mark Cannella, the gap wasn’t a matter of too much European-style training but of too little. “We need to be more like them,” he said. “They’re breaking it down, videotaping and analyzing every single lift.” Like gymnastics and dance, Olympic lifting requires such balance, flexibility, and form that it greatly rewards early training—it’s like “barbell ballet,” Vern Mangold said. But most American schools have long since replaced their free weights with machines. “It’s a national disgrace,” Arthur Drechsler, of USA Weightlifting, told me. “If you want to fight childhood obesity or increase fitness, no sport can transform you as much as weight lifting—look at Tommy Kono. And it’s one of the safest things you can do. We don’t have spinal-cord injuries. We don’t have head injuries. They just don’t happen. But weight lifting is not part of the public schools.”
Even with the right training, Americans might still not reach the podium. Unlike strongmen and bodybuilders, Olympic athletes are subject to stringent drug tests in this country, including unannounced visits to their homes. Oversight tends to be much spottier abroad. Since 1976, twelve lifters, all but one of them from Eastern Europe, have been stripped of Olympic medals owing to drug use. A weight lifter can expect about a ten-to-fifteen-per-cent boost from performance-enhancing drugs, Terry Todd estimates—just about what separates Mangold from medal contention. It’s a situation that reminds him of Mark Henry, another prodigy who came late to lifting, stayed clean, and fell short of Olympic gold: “If he had started early and didn’t take drugs, he would have beaten them,” Todd said. “If he had used the drugs and started later, he would have beaten them. But two hurdles was too much.”