The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (34 page)

 

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 50 percent mental and 30 percent 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 20 percent, 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 12-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 10 or 15 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 58 kilos, and Natalie Burgener, at 69. 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 300 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 350 pounds, I feel sluggish. But at 330 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, 12 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 10 to 15 percent 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.”

 

The strongmen didn't have that problem. Theirs, for better or for worse, was a sport without a rule book—an unregulated experiment. It set no limits and allowed no excuses. In the elevator at the hotel on the last night, I heard a groan and looked over to see Travis Ortmayer, the strongman from Texas, doubled over with his elbows on his knees. “You all right, Travis?” I asked. “I've been better,” he said. “A thing like this puts the beat on you.” The smallest man in the contest by 20 pounds, Ortmayer had been a late substitute for Benedikt Magnússon, an Icelandic strongman who tore one of his biceps in training. “I've never zeroed out of a competition like this before,” he said. “Usually, I would have been getting ready since December. But after the World's I took three months off to give my body a rest.” When I asked him what hurt, he said pretty much everything.

Earlier that day, Ortmayer and the others had completed two more rounds. First came an event called the Austrian Oak, in honor of Schwarzenegger's nickname as a bodybuilder. This involved lifting a 10-foot log from a stand at close to shoulder height, then pressing it overhead repeatedly. Banded with steel and coiled with thick rope at the ends, the Oak weighed 459 pounds—it took five large men to carry it onstage. Four of the strongmen declined to try to lift it at all, and four tried and failed. That left Savickas, who managed one lift, and Jenkins, who did two. Shaw, his left arm in obvious pain, was among those who had to settle for a lighter Oak, of 393 pounds. But in a display of incredible grit he lifted it seven times in a row—screaming himself hoarse on the sixth try—putting him in fourth place overall.

“Blood, sweat, and tears, broken bones and torn muscles,” the commentator, a former World's Strongest Man named Bill Kazmaier, told the crowd. “This is strongman. It's the last man standing.” On the speakers overhead, Alice in Chains sang “Check My Brain.” The Hummer Tire Dead Lift was next: up to eight oversized tires hung on a bar with steel plates—the heaviest of all the lifts. Jenkins conceded the lead early, topping out at 928 pounds. Derek Poundstone, ranked third, outlifted him by over 100 pounds—more than enough, I thought, to beat Shaw with his biceps half gone. “Get behind an injured man who's shot in the arm,” Kazmaier shouted. “C'mon, Brian! Everybody's behind you!”

Shaw's left hand had begun to lose its grip, but the rules allowed him to secure it to the bar with a nylon strap. As he bent down to take the weight—1,073 pounds, 11 pounds more than Poundstone's lift—he raised his face toward the crowd and bellowed. Then he blew out his cheeks once, twice, and lurched upward. The crowd was on its feet, as Kazmaier thundered into the microphone, “Power! Power! Power!” The barbell bent beneath its load, and Shaw's body began to oscillate like a tuning fork. By the time his back was straight, his eyes were burning and blood was streaming from his nose, into his mouth, and down his chin. But the lift was good.

He was now tied for second place with Jenkins and Poundstone, just two and a half points behind Savickas. The latter had set a new world record in the dead lift: 1,117 pounds. But the last event—the Timber Carry—was one of Savickas's worst, whereas Shaw had won it in record time the year before. If he could hang on one more time, the championship would be his.

 

On their way to Veterans Memorial Auditorium that night, for the final event of the contest, the men sat quietly in a private coach, submerged in their thoughts. They had the half-desperate look of soldiers in a convoy, advancing toward a beachhead. Strongman is a brotherhood, they said. There wasn't much trash talk or posturing at contests like this—the lifts were daunting enough on their own—but I'd often seen them cheer and comfort one another between lifts, and even offer advice. The year before, at the World's Strongest Man, they had to drag a 22,000-pound Titan truck more than 80 feet down a road. Shaw, who prided himself on fastidious preparation, had ordered a pair of custom truck-pulling shoes from England, with high-friction soles. He would have won the contest, had he not given his spare pair to Björnsson, who beat him by half a second.

Victory at the Arnold meant much more than bragging rights: it was a rare chance to earn a living at this sport. The purses for most strongman contests are paltry—$3,000 to $5,000—especially given the risks involved. But the winner of the Arnold would take home $55,000. Shaw and his girlfriend were living in a small two-bedroom apartment not far from his parents. And Jenkins had been laid off from a teaching job that fall, at a high school for troubled teenagers in Harrisburg. In November, he'd opened up a gym with money that he borrowed from his parents, but business was slow, and he was getting married that summer. “My gosh, $55,000 could change your life,” he told me.

At the auditorium, the bodybuilding finals were just wrapping up. A line of women in high heels and glitter bikinis were posing for photographs backstage, their skin bronzed and lacquered, their implants all in a row. Theirs was the least bulky of the bodybuilding categories—which rose, in order of ascending mass, from Bikini to Figure to Fitness to Ms. International—but they looked as sinewy as velociraptors. When I asked the winner, a diminutive brunette named Sonia Gonzales, what set her apart, she flashed her teeth. “My sex,” she said. Behind the curtain, the male bodybuilders were preparing for the final pose-down. They'd been dehydrating themselves for days, so every vein and striation showed, but their limbs were cramped, their minds depleted. They sat hunched on benches or stood flexing in front of mirrors, as hollow-eyed as statues in a sculpture garden.

The stage set had a classical theme—broken columns against a fiery sky—and a long, low ramp ran in front of it. When the strongman final began, a huge wooden frame, roughly bolted together out of barn timbers, was carried out and placed at one end. The object was to stand inside this frame, lift it by a pair of handles along the sides, and run up the ramp as fast as possible. The frame weighed nearly 900 pounds—more than most strongmen could deadlift—and, unlike the previous year, no wrist straps were allowed. This was a problem for Shaw, but no less so for Savickas. The great Lithuanian had lost some of his grip strength over the years, as the weight he'd gained had gone into his fingers. “It's like putting on a tight pair of gloves, then another pair, and another pair,” Todd told me. “Each one makes it that much harder to grip—there's flesh where there used to be space.”

The Timber Carry was the climax of the contest and extremely hard on the body. Four of the strongmen never made it up the ramp. The weight tore calluses from their hands, and the frame kept tipping and slipping as they ran. Savickas looked strong at first, then lost his grip, dropping the frame six times before leaving it for good—two yards from the finish line. Others fared better. Travis Ortmayer reached the top in just under nine and a half seconds—good enough for a touch of redemption—and Derek Poundstone was almost two seconds faster. Afterward, Poundstone tore off his shirt and flexed for the crowd, just as Jan Todd had predicted.

When Shaw came to the starting line, he looked loose and light on his feet. He shook the kinks from his arms and bounced on his toes like a boxer, then bent down to pick up the frame. It seemed, for a moment, as he charged up the slope, that he might just make it in time. “I could see the finish line,” he told me the next morning. “But then you're trying to hold on, and your grip starts to lose it, and it's just opening, opening, opening. And it's just . . . pain. I feel the worst pain. I don't know anything else.” He was less than two feet from the top when the last strands of his biceps tore free, and the frame came thudding down. He managed one last, agonizing push to the finish line, as blinded and enraged as Samson in the temple. Then he stumbled backstage and collapsed.

Victory, in the end, went to Mike Jenkins. He hurtled up the ramp in just under seven and a half seconds—14-100ths faster than Poundstone—and won the championship by a single point. Later that night, at the trophy presentation, Schwarzenegger asked him how he'd done it: “For schlepping up this weight up the ramp—I mean, how do you train for something like that?” Jenkins leveled his eyes at him, deadpan. “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I do yoga at 6:00
A.M
.,” he said. “Then Tuesdays, Thursdays, I have Zumba at 7:00
P.M
.” Schwarzenegger grinned and nodded. “That's very impressive,” he said. “I can really visualize you in yoga positions. This is exciting. I think we can sell tickets to that one.”