World’s Strongest Man: the 1980s

I was fortunate enough to receive the box set of World’s Strongest Man finals from the 1980’s for my birthday in January.  I’ve been working my way through them on the odd evening that I get home in time to do more than pay a visit to my garage gym and then hit the sack.

I have posted about strongman before and I often have links to useful sites.  If you’re interested, check out my top 10 website resources for strongman.  I also love watching World’s Strongest Man on television – it’s probably the highlight of my televiewing year – and I enjoy using strongman equipment in my workouts, especially when the weather is nice and I can use the garden.

And not only has it been an enjoyable experience for me, training wise, it’s produced some fun blog posts too, including:

• how to make simple farmers’ walk bars;
• how to make (more complicated) farmer’s walk bars;
• how to make a cheap sandbag;
• training with sandbags (lifting and loading);
• how to make a fat bar (for axle deadlifts, cleans and presses).

However, please note that I don’t compete and I don’t profess to any inside knowledge.  That aside, I hope you enjoy this article.

If you want to buy the DVD, you can find it here.

The events

Watching how the events change from year to year is a fascinating study in and of itself.  Here is my summary:

You can see that I don’t have the events for 1981.  This is because the footage for that year is not shown on the DVD because it was not possible to retrieve it.  There was no competition in 1987 so there are no events in that year, either.  Also interesting is that the number of events was reduced from ten down to eight in 1983.

The events for 1980 and 1982 were almost identical, with the only differences being the order of the events and the interchange of the wheelbarrow and freezer carry in 1980 for the caber toss and keg loading in 1982.

1983 also had most of the favourite events, just losing the block lift and the battery hold.  1984 was very dfferent, with no block lift and no deadlift, no weight for height and no bar bending!

Here’s another way of looking at the events:

You can see from this table that the most popular events in the 1980s are:

• the truck pull,
• the crucifix or forward hold,
• lorry loading, and
• the deadlift.

The rankings

At the extremely high level that these athletes are performing, the rankings change a lot from year to year.  Most of them are probably only on top form for a few weeks or months every year.  I expect that a full ranking across the semi-finals might yield more patterns but I don’t have those to hand.  Anyway, here are the results I have:

I have the placings for 1981 because you can find them on Wikipedia.  It’s interesting that when they reduced the events from ten to eight that they also reduced the competitors from ten to eight.  There was no contest in 1987, although there was a similar contest, called Pure Strength, which I have not seen.  I understand that in that competition Sigmarsson came first, Kazmaier second and Capes was injured.

From these tables, you can see that during the 1980′s, not many competitors attend more than two finals, unless they are winning:

• John Gamble appears twice.
• Ilkka Nummisto appears twice (in the 1980′s) and twice also in the 1990′s.
• Lazslo Fekete appears twice (in the 1980′s) and twice also in the 1990′s.
• Ab Wolders, Tom Magee and Dave Waddington appear three times (but not in consecutive years).

Only Geoff Capes, Jon Pall Sigmarsson and Bill Kazmaier appear more than three times in the 1980′s and they were all winning regularly.

• Capes has an unbroken run from 1980 through to 1986 (seven finals) and won twice.
• Sigmarsson has an unbroken run from 1983 (his first year) through to 1990 (eight finals) and won four times.
• Kazmaier appears in 1980 to 1982 and then 1988 to 1989 and won three times.

It is such a great shame that Kazmaier was not there to compete against Sigmarsson and Capes in the European years from 1983 to 1987.

I’m going to do a short series of posts with a review of each of the episodes, so if you don’t like strongman, you might want to look away for a bit…

I write a post every day so don’t forget to subscribe or you’ll miss out