We don't know who the strongest man in Egypt is, but last Saturday, in front of the Luxor temples and more than a few curious tourists, the quest began to find the Egyptian Hercules. Eighty men from Upper Egypt launched this first-time event in the country. Under the auspices of the National Sports Council and sponsored by the country's oil sector, the championship will scour the country in search for Mr Most Muscles. In Luxor, the athletes carried what we believe were 122 kg cement blocks in each hand for a set distance, and competed for the fastest time. A yoke composed of a crossbar and two weighted uprights of about 402 kilos was carried across the shoulders for a set distance. A 177 kg pot with a handle was carried, suspended between the legs, over a set course. And a car was pulled across a 30 m course as fast as possible. Lifting and towing such behemoth weights looks impossible but do they really show who's strongest? It used to be that the world's strongest man was a title allocated to the weightlifter who could lift the most. Antonio Krastev of Bulgaria in 1987 heaved the heaviest snatch of all time (in which competitors must lift the barbell from the floor to above their heads in one continuous movement) - 216 kg. Leonid Taranenko of the former Soviet Union made the heaviest clean and jerk of all time (where competitors first clean the barbell from the floor to an intermediate position, racking the bar in a front squat, then standing up in the concentric portion of the front squat, and finally jerking the barbell to a position above their head) lifting 266 kilos in 1988. But organizers of the Met-Rx World s Strongest Man, the most recognized annual international event in strength athletics, believe their show produces the strongest there is. They claim the strongman title should go to John Wooten of Massachusetts. At 51, Wooten towed a Mississippi river boat against the current, piggybacked an elephant, stopped two jet planes from taking off by holding them down, and pulled a 280-ton train along a track. Wooten, 1.86m tall and weighing 132 kg, got his start in the strongman business in 1969 when he happened to meet a man in his 70s who could bend 60-penny railroad spikes with his bare hands. John Gagnon (1883-1939) was another Met-Rx creation who could tear a horseshoe apart with his bare hands, bend a railroad spike into a U and pick up 794 pounds with one finger. As impressive as these feats are, they don't compare with the stunts of the two strongest men of myth. Hercules captured the oxen of Geryon, a monstrous creature with three heads and three bodies (reminds me of a girl I used to know) and strangled Hydra, a swamp monster with nine heads (reminds me of another girl I used to know). He once clubbed a lion to death, but was even more courageous when, confronting a race of fierce women Amazon warriors, he managed to steal the magic girdle of their queen. For one of his greatest feats, Hercules used his brain as much as brawn. To clean out a stable of 3,000 oxen which had not been cleaned in 30 years he re-routed two rivers (while, I reckon, holding his nose). Samson was something of a Herculean figure, utilizing massive strength to combat his enemies and perform heroic feats unachievable by ordinary men: wrestling a lion, slaying an entire army with nothing more than a donkey s jawbone, and tearing down an entire building. This is the stuff we used to dream of doing as kids and probably still continue to fantasize about until today.
