Sport Jim White

THE WORLD’S STRONGEST MAN

It has long been a glorious, unmissable staple of the Christmas television schedules: a bunch of improbably contoured supermen flipping tractor tyres, hauling articulated lorries with their bare hands and running along with a barrel-load of gravel under each arm, all in pursuit of the title The Strongest Man In The World.

And, over the past couple of decades, the chap, built like a small, armoured vehicle who has won, has invariably come from Finland, Iceland or Poland. This is the field sport of the Viking.

Until this year. Back in May, in the unlikely surroundings of a Botswana game park, 29-year-old Eddie Hall from Stoke-on-trent became the first Briton to seize the trophy in 24 years. It was a title the amiable, chatty, if freakishly sized Hall had dreamed of holding, ever since he first watched the competition one Christmas when he was a child.

‘For me there’s two things to call yourself,’ Eddie told me when I met him training in his gym. ‘Either the world’s fastest man or the world’s strongest man. I was never going to be the fastest. But I could be the strongest. It’s the most alpha-male title on the planet.’

And it didn’t come easy. Since he took up the sport full time in 2014, he has been eating 12,000 calories a day in an attempt to add a stone of muscle every year. He is huge: he has a 63in chest, his neck is 26in, his biceps measure 2ft in circumference. To stand next to him is to feel immediately insignificant, as if you belong to a different species.

Every day he puts that vast scale under duress. Because lifting big, big weights – which is how he trains – has consequences. Take the time Hall broke the world deadlift record. He was on stage at the Leeds Arena in April 2016, trying to become the first man to lift 500 kilos, the weight of a fully-grown polar bear. When Hall stepped forward and, with a roar, successfully hoisted the steel bar, as it bent under its colossal half tonne load, the 11,000-strong audience cheered him to the echo. Then, after dropping the bar, he fainted. He woke up on the floor, with blood seeping out of his mouth, his nose, his eyes.

‘My blood pressure was well over 200,’ he recalled. ‘It could have killed me.’

But having proved himself the Roger Bannister of deadlifting, breaking a record long deemed beyond human capability, and having then become the world’s strongest man, Hall is not stopping now. In the past, after clinching the title in May, the winner was contractually obliged to keep quiet until the competition was broadcast at Christmas. Not Hall. Driven by his financial backer, Mo Chaudry, the man who owns the gym where he trains, he did a deal with the organisers that he could tell the world of his win. And he has set off in pursuit of something altogether more ephemeral: fame.

‘The world’s strongest man is one of our own,’ Chaudry told me. ‘That is just huge... He’s already got 750,000 followers on Instagram.’

Since he announced he had won the title, Hall’s published his autobiography, lifted BBC Breakfast presenters over his head and undertaken a stadium tour of the country, exploiting his moment as the most alpha of alpha males. And Chaudry reckoned this is just the start.

‘One of my ambitions is what Eddie can do to bring people together. Pakistan, where my family come from, is a broken society. Eddie doing performances there will be what the public needs. This is a big statement, but it’s what I believe: Eddie Hall is the next Arnold Schwarzenegger.’

There was me thinking the World’s Strongest Man was just a bloke who could push-start a locomotive when it stalls at Reading Station.