No Weaklings Here: Weight Lifting's Hall of Fame

Date: 04-08-2003 Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamUnited States

Competitive weight lifting, in which athletes raise specific amounts of weight off the floor, is not bodybuilding, in which athletes sculpt their muscles by means of weight training. Both sports, as well as powerlifting (three attempts to lift more weight than anyone else in your weight class), are represented in the Weightlifting Hall of Fame, which shares a building with the York Barbell Co. near York, Pa.

To see the displays at the Hall of Fame is to realize how puny you are. Check out the Travis dumbbell, which looks like an iron rattle for a gigantic baby and weighs some 1,600 pounds. The lifter attaches a chain to a belt and lifts the barbell off the ground with the hips. (Warren Travis, by the way, weighed 180 pounds.)

Or see Louis Cyr, pictured in an event staged in 1892, holding back four draft horses that are pulling away from him in opposite directions. Or Eugen Sandow, a pioneering bodybuilder, lifting a pony -- with one arm -- also in 1892. Or Josef Steinbach in 1907 holding a 310-pound barbell over his head.

That's in the strongman section of the museum. Then you enter "The Story of Weightlifting" which details the rise of the sport to its Olympic status, mostly in oversized photos of champions with captions spelling out their accomplishments.

And there are exhibits on "physique champions," including a life-sized body cast of Sandow, said to be the link between the strongmen of the carnival midway to serious bodybuilders.

There also is a marble statue of John Grimek, an Olympic weight lifter (1936), two-time Mr. America (1940 and '41) and Mr. Universe (1948). He retired undefeated. He was one of the York employees who helped spread the sport in its early days.

Before you ask: Yes, the world's most identifiable former Mr. Olympia, summer movie protagonist and genioplasty recipient (to correct a jutting jawline), Arnold Schwarzenegger, is represented, though rather tangentially, in the physique room. His brand of chemically enhanced bodybuilding is the image the new York is trying to shed as it becomes a total fitness company.