Video views and kudos for attacked weightlifter
A 19-year-old man whose powerlifting workout at a Montreal-area gym was aggressively curtailed by another member for being too loud in an incident that has gone viral online has been offered a year’s free membership at a South Shore strength-training gym.
And Charles-Antoine Lalonde will be in good company at the SSP Barbell Club, where powerlifting is popular and where everyone is loud, said co-owner Steve Dubé.
“Strength training is noisy ... If I don’t hear anything, there is something wrong.”
Lalonde was at the Greenfield Park location of Buzzfit gyms at about 3 a.m. on Aug. 2. He was doing a powerlifting exercise known as deadlifting, in which a bar holding weights is lifted from the ground to hip level and then lowered to the ground.
He was mid-set, lifting 350 pounds, when another member approached and kicked the bar out of his hands. He then shoved Lalonde against the wall. All the while he was yelling “You’re out” and “Get out.”
Lalonde said in an email Monday that he has reported the incident to police and they are investigating.
The video of the exchange was posted later on Aug. 2 by Tennessee-based powerlifting coach and trainer Pete Rubish, a professional power lifter who has been coaching online for 41/2 years and working with Lalonde for about a year.
Working remotely, he sets out for his clients what lifts he wants them to do; they film some of their sets and send them to him. Lalonde had his smartphone propped on the ground that Thursday and “the camera was rolling,” Rubish said.
Rubish said some gym members complained about the noise of the weights hitting the ground during Lalonde’s workouts and staff had been giving “my client a hard time in past weeks about deadlifting too loudly.”
But strength training at Lalonde’s level is, by definition, noisy.
“You are picking the bar up off the ground. All the work and benefit you are receiving is on the way up,” Rubish said. “When you put it back down, you can’t not drop it.”
Said Dubé of SSP Barbell: “We slam the bar. That’s the way it is. If you are lifting a weight 100 pounds heavier than you are, or more, it will come down hard and make noise.”
Lalonde “was pretty upset” when he sent him the video of the incident, said Rubish, who decided to post it on his YouTube channel.
“I thought it would get some playback within the powerlifting community.”
But he couldn’t have predicted the response: A video of the incident received more than 1.6 million views by Monday evening. Thousands of comments have denounced the other member’s behaviour.
What the gym member did to Lalonde “was about as disrespectful a move as anyone could do — and kind of dangerous, too,” Rubish said.
Although some comments have suggested the assailant is a gym employee, he is not, said Craig Johnson, head of operations for Buzzfit. He has been banned from the gym, he said, and a staff member was suspended for two weeks in connection with the incident.
Because of complaints from some members, Lalonde had been asked to place mats under the weight plates and he had complied, Johnson said. The day of the incident, “it wasn’t that much of an issue because he had made the adjustments he had been asked to make.”
Johnson said Buzzfit tried to contact Lalonde to offer him a lifetime membership. In his Monday evening email, Lalonde said he was offered only a year’s membership, “but even if they had offered an unlimited membership, I would have refused it.”
He said that no one from Buzzfit apologized for the incident and “furthermore, they even blamed me for the incident in their first email, before the video became as popular as it did.”