Strongman

That's a real strongman, bestow upon him a goblet of wine!

Tom is a strongman.

He is a strongman.

The sport also requires a little ingenuity. The things he lifts in competition are a bit unusual, often looking more like debris from a construction site than regulation weights. For instance, one piece of equipment looks like a yoke with a concrete block attached to either end, another, like a large metal log. Therefore Mr. Pfister has to make most of his training equipment himself. The strongman even keeps an old car at his house to practice flipping over heavy objects. He uses these 180 kilo stone balls for a variety of exercises involving lifting and walking.

Pulling two huge 18-wheeler trucks across an arena or lifting a 174 kilo boulder may sound like the feats of a super hero, but they are perfectly ordinary events in Strongman competitions. The international sport includes more than 20 events, all geared towards extreme lifting.

As Phil Pfister's 24-hour shift at Firestation 2 comes to a close, he switches his mind set from fire fighter, to strongman. Three years ago, the brawny, blue eyed, blond entered a strongman weight-lifting competition. He easily won and never looked back.

West Virginians and people all across the country can proudly watch the American Strongman when he again competes in the World's Strongest Man Contest, being held this October in Zimbabwe.

Giovanni Battista Belzoni, the famous Egyptian archeologist, who was a man of gigantic stature, began his public career as a strongman at the Bartholomew Fair, under the management of Gyngell, the conjuror, who dubbed him The Young Hercules.

Opposite him was the Fat Lady, red-faced and laughing. Beside her, the India-rubber Man wound spaghetti on to a fork with an expression of deepest melancholy. Further down the table, the Strong Man, an overcoat covering his leopard-skin, talked garrulously.

Kazakhstan’s explosion into unrest this week presents a stark warning to the strongman autocrats of the world: Leaving office is perilous. Since the Cold War’s end, a staggering 70 percent of governments headed by strongmen collapsed after the ruler departed, according to one data set.