Franco Columbu
Bodybuilding champion who became Arnold Schwarzenegger’s training partner and closest friend
FRANCO COLUMBU, who has died aged 78, was an Italian bodybuilding champion widely regarded in the 1970s as the world’s strongest man; besides helping to popularise gym culture and a certain kind of masculine fitness, he was for many years the training partner and best friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The pair first met in 1965 in Stuttgart, where they were competing in a powerlifting competition. Unlike the “Austrian Oak”, Columbu, who was six years older than Schwarzenegger, stood just 5ft 5in tall. He could lift phenomenal weights, however, and the young Austrian, who wanted to improve his ability to do so, suggested that once he had completed his military service the following year they team up.
Based in Munich – Columbu had moved to Germany from his native Sardinia to work as a labourer – Schwarzenegger taught the Italian about bodybuilding. He found in Columbu someone both capable of encouraging him to greater effort and comfortable in his shadow.
When Schwarzenegger moved to California in 1968 at the behest of Joe Weider, the creator of the Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition, he persuaded Weider to pay for Columbu to come to live there as well.
The stipend from Weider was not large, and while Schwarzenegger was building his reputation he and Columbu ran a bricklaying business together. By the mid-seventies, however, Rolling Stone magazine estimated that the “Sardinian Strongman” was earning about $50,000 annually (now £185,000) from competitions and endorsements, with Schwarzenegger making twice that.
Documentaries such as Pumping Iron (1977), as well as one about Columbu directed by Isabella Rossellini, contributed to their fame. So did the pair’s accumulation of titles. Columbu won Mr Olympia in 1976 and 1981, preceded on both occasions by Schwarzenegger. The Italian was noted especially for his remarkable dorsal muscle development, which from the rear gave him a shape akin to a manta ray.
“This is not a normal thing,” he readily
admitted, in an era when the use of anabolic steroids was not disguised. “We have the muscles developed to the maximum, trying to win a contest. Muscles developed the way we’re developed – that’s abnormal. We are too developed.”
At his peak, when he weighed 185lbs (13st 3lbs) Columbu was recorded as having bench-pressed weights of 525lbs. In training, he deadlifted some 780lbs, more than four times his weight. His other feats of strength included picking up a car so the tyres could be changed. In 1979 he entered the Guinness Book of Records after using lung power to burst a hot water bottle in 55 seconds.
Schwarzenegger remembered him practising abdominal crunches hanging by his toes from horizontal bars and candidly described the pocket-sized Samson as the strongest man he had ever known. One anecdote told was that Columbu would pick up a donkey and Schwarzenegger would encourage passers-by to “look at my friend’s ass.”
In 1977, Columbu took part in the first World’s Strongest Man competition, but while running downhill with a fridge strapped to his back he stepped in a hole and dislocated his knee. (The sports agent Mark Mccormack subsequently claimed that Columbu won $1 million in compensation.)
That same year, Columbu qualified as a chiropractor and, having returned to full fitness, retired from competition in 1981.
Francesco Columbu was born into humble circumstances at Ollolai in central Sardinia on August 7 1941. His first exercises were lifting stones in the yard at home. He took up boxing at 16 and for a while during his time in Germany nurtured ambitions in the sport.
As Schwarzenegger became a star in Hollywood, he secured cameos for Columbu in many of his films. He appeared as a Pictish scout in Conan the Barbarian and most notably, perhaps, as a Terminator infiltrating a human base in The Terminator (1984). His own attempts to carve a career for himself in film had little success.
Besides practising as a chiropractor in Los Angeles, Columbu had a line of sports and food supplements and worked as a fitness coach. It was he who bulked up Sylvester Stallone for the title role in Rambo in 1985.
The following year, Columbu was best man at Schwarzenegger’s wedding to Maria Shriver, President Kennedy’s niece.
Paying tribute, Schwarzenegger wrote: “I am devastated today. But I am also so, so grateful for the 54 years of friendship and joy we shared. The pumps, the chess games, the construction work, the meals, the pranks, the life lessons – we did it all together … My life was more fun, more colourful, and more complete because of you … You were my best friend.”
Every year, Columbu would return to Sardinia for several weeks and he died after being taken ill while swimming there.
His first marriage, to Anita Sant’angelo, a fellow chiropractor, ended in divorce. He married secondly, in 1990, Deborah Drake. She survives him with their daughter.
Franco Columbu, born August 7 1941, died August 30 2019