Thomas Inch, bicycling.

From “The Strongest Man in the World,” Burkhard Bilger’s ungated New Yorker piece about Brian Shaw, a Colorado man born to move mountains, and the new wave of strength competitions:

“In the summer of 2005, when Shaw was twenty-three, he went to Las Vegas for a strength-and-conditioning convention. He was feeling a little adrift. He had a degree in wellness management from Black Hills State University, in South Dakota, and was due to start a master’s program at Arizona State that fall. But after moving to Tempe, a few weeks earlier, and working out with the football team, he was beginning to have second thoughts. ‘This was a big Division I, Pac-10 school, but I was a little surprised, to be honest,’ he told me. ‘I was so much stronger than all of them.’ One day at the convention, Shaw came upon a booth run by Sorinex, a company that has designed weight-lifting systems for the Denver Broncos and other football programs. The founder, Richard Sorin, liked to collect equipment used by old-time strongmen and had set out a few items for passersby to try. There were some kettle bells lying around, like cannonballs with handles attached, and a clumsy-looking thing called a Thomas Inch dumbbell.

Inch was an early-twentieth-century British strongman famous for his grip. His dumbbell, made of cast iron, weighed a hundred and seventy-two pounds and had a handle as thick as a tin can, difficult to grasp. In his stage shows, Inch would offer a prize of more than twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency to anyone who could lift the dumbbell off the floor with one hand. For more than fifty years, no one but Inch managed it, and only a few dozen have done so in the half century since. ‘A thousand people will try to lift it in a weekend, and a thousand won’t lift it,’ Sorin told me. ‘A lot of strong people have left with their tails between their legs.’ It came as something of a shock, therefore, to see Shaw reach over and pick up the dumbbell as if it were a paperweight. ‘He was just standing there with a blank look on his face,’ Sorin said. ‘It was, like, What’s so very hard about this?’

When Shaw set down the dumbbell and walked away, Sorin ran over to find him in the crowd. ‘His eyes were huge,’ Shaw recalls. ‘He said, ‘Can you do that again?’ And I said, ‘Of course I can.’ So he took a picture and sent it to me afterward.’ Sorin went on to tell Shaw about the modern strongman circuit—an extreme sport, based on the kinds of feat performed by men like Inch, which had a growing following worldwide. ‘He said that my kind of strength was unbelievable. It was a one in a million. If I didn’t do something with my abilities, I was stupid. That was pretty cool.’

Three months later, Shaw won his first strongman event.”

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Shaw deadlifting 1073 pounds this year with a torn biceps: