The Best American Sports Writing 2013 by Glenn Stout

Author:Glenn Stout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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.

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