World’s Strongest Man: the 1990s

As well as the box set of the 1980′s World’s Strongest Man finals, I was fortunate enough to receive the box set of the 1990’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.  So I’ve done a few reviews of the episodes but before I get to them, here are a few pointers and resources…

Strongman resources

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

Here is a listing of the events for the years from 1991 to 1999.  I don’t have the events from 1990 because the footage wasn’t good enough from that year to put on the DVD.

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:

My thoughts

When I talked about the 1980′s, I noted that not many of the athletes came to more than two finals unless they were regular winnners.  This seems to be less true about the 1990′s.  First, here are the followers of the rule:

• Magnus Ver Magnusson had a clear run of six attendances from 1991 (his first year as replacement for Sigmarsson) through to 1996 and he won four of those titles.
• Jouko Ahola attended three times and won twice.

And here are the deviations from the rule:

• Gary Taylor won just once in 1993 but had four attendances in 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1995.
• Magnus Samuelsson won just once in 1998 but attended an astonishing nine times in total: four times from 1995 to 1999 and five times from 2000 to 2004.
• Gerrit Badenhorst did not win but had a clear run of five attendances from 1992 to 1996.
• Torfi Olafsson attended three times but did not win.
• Flemming Rasmussen attended three times but did not win. 

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