Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks was giving an interview once and he was describing a job he had early in his career, before he was a big name, where he had worked with a group of actors and directors who were much more experienced and skilled than he was. It was a tough situation, as he described it, because he was working in a talent pool that was way over his head. However, instead of whining and complaining when he remembered it all, he spoke of the whole thing as a valuable time that made him much better as an actor and a professional. One of the quotes he used during this interview was, “You never learn anything unless you get your butt kicked first.” This line always stuck with me and I’ve come to believe that Hanks was right, in a lot of ways. In application to weightlifting and professional life, I think one of the best moves you can ever make is to surround yourself with people who are better than you. You’re forced to work twice as hard and learn twice as fast if you want to move up and become an equal to these people, instead of staying at the bottom of the totem pole and accepting your role as the wanna-be. Obviously, being around people who are better than you is going to put you in a position where you feel defeat and inferiority at times. But that defeat should sharpen your hunger and, hopefully, the end result will be that you found a way to step up your game and compete on an even level with the top players. These ideas are exactly what I think about when I remember a moment in 2000 when I got a chance to compete against the best weightlifter on the planet.

Andrei Chemerkin won the Olympic gold medal in the 1996 Atlanta games. A massive twenty four year-old Russian superheavyweight, Andrei pulled out one of the greatest clutch lifts in weightlifting memory when he crushed a 260 kilo clean and jerk (a weight he had never made before) on his last attempt to defeat Germany’s Ronny

Weller and take the gold medal. It was an amazing moment that concluded one of the greatest superheavyweight competitions in Olympic history. After it was over, Andrei went on to establish himself as an almost unbeatable figure during the next four years. He followed up his Olympic victory with the 1997 World Championship, where he duplicated his Olympic final-attempt heroics by clean and jerking 262.5 kilos to once again beat Ronny Weller. Two more world championship titles in 1998 and 1999 gave Chemerkin an aura of invincibility. Not only was he the strongest weightlifter walking God’s green earth, he was also the consummate pressure performer. The big man proved several times that he possessed one of the most important qualities an athlete can have: the ability to put up his greatest performances when his back was against the wall and he only had one shot left. Many people, myself included, began to regard Andrei in the same fashion as Alexeev during his prime. He was the king, plain and simple.

Knowing this, I knew it would be one of the highlights of my career when I found out that I was going to compete against Chemerkin at the 2000 World University Championships in Montreal. I qualified to compete for the US team in the superheavyweight class, and it had been widely advertised that Andrei was going to lift at this meet. I never knew exactly why he chose to travel all the way to Canada for this competition. The meet was held in June, only a few months before the Sydney Olympics, where he was obviously going to be attempting to defend his title. Although there were several outstanding international athletes at this university worlds, no superheavyweights were in attendance that had any chance to compete with the big man. But regardless of any reasons or details, the strongest weightlifter in the universe was planning to show up at this meet and I was going to lift on the same platform. I saw some amazing things on this trip and I learned some of the best lessons of my life. Here’s how it went...

Montreal...

When I arrived in Montreal for the competition, the buzz was working overtime. Everyone was talking about Andrei Chemerkin. How much was he going to lift? Was he going to attempt a world record? Why was he competing in this meet? Was he even a university student? I joked to somebody that his college verification paperwork would probably be a cocktail napkin with the words “Andrei goes to school. Signed, Andrei” written on it in pencil. Although there was an entire world championship competition happening that weekend and, interestingly, a world record had been set in one of the lighter women’s weight classes, the big Russian grizzly was the main event. After I flew into the airport and traveled to the hotel to check into my room, I turned around in the hotel lobby and saw him walking past me.

It’s important to understand that this is one enormous piece of manflesh we’re talking about. Andrei was walking near me and he paused for a few minutes to speak to somebody else, and I got a good look at him. His height wasn’t overwhelming. I’m six feet tall and I was looking eye-to-eye with him. But the height wasn’t what made the impression. This man’s head looked like a cannonball. And believe me, that cannonball was sitting on top of a gargantuan pile of muscle. Andrei weighed around 175 kilos at the time (385 pounds, and we’ll talk more about his bodyweight later). He was wearing sweatpants, a t-shirt, and a flannel jacket that looked like it could have functioned as a pup tent for a troop of Boy Scouts. I noticed that he had a pack of bananas jammed into his pocket as he walked away. I don’t mean that he had two or three bananas, either. Think about when you go to the grocery store and you see the bananas in the produce section, with eight or nine of them attached in a bunch. Just pick up one of these bunches, without picking any of the bananas off, and ram it into your pocket. That’s what I’m talking about.

A couple of days later, our competition was getting ready to start and the superheavyweights were in the warm-up room preparing to walk out on the platform for introductions. Our names were called and we were put in a line before the competition director walked us out to the platform. That’s when I turned around and saw that it was happening the way I hoped it would... Andrei and I were right next to each other in the introduction line. Although I knew he didn’t speak much English, I extended my hand to him and said, “Good luck today, brother.” He smiled and shook my hand. Actually, I should say he swallowed my hand with his catcher’s mitt of a paw. It was like shaking hands with the abominable snowman. When we walked out to the platform, the crowd went crazy. The announcer went down the line and introduced each athlete one-by-one, and the whole time I kept thinking to myself, “God, I hope somebody gets a picture of me standing next to him.”

Side story: After the competition was over, I left Montreal to go home and I was convinced that nobody had taken a picture of us in the introduction line. It was a bummer because Andrei was a living legend and a picture of the two of us together would be a nice addition to my weightlifting scrapbook. I got home, a few weeks passed, and I got an envelope in the mail. Inside the envelope were two or three pictures from the competition, including a nice shot of Andrei and me standing side by side during the introductions. It was a total surprise to me when I got the pictures in the mail, and there was a note inside saying, “I was at this meet watching and I took these. I hope you like them!” The good Samaritan, who I didn’t even know at the time, was a seventeen year-old lifter named Carissa Gordon. That’s a true story.

Back to the meet...

I had a mediocre day on the platform and placed sixth in the superheavyweight class. Andrei won, obviously, with “light lifts” of 190 in the snatch and 230 in the clean and jerk. No world record attempts, but there was plenty to see and learn as I watched his every move during the competition. First of all, his “stretching routine” was quite a sight. After he put on his shoes, which he had to do by posting his foot against a chair and then leaning forward because his gut was too massive for him to reach his feet, he stood up. Then he hopped off the ground three or four times. And when I say “hopped,” I mean he moved his girth up and down by bending and extending his knees. I’m not sure if his feet actually separated from the floor. Then he extended his arms out to his sides and shook his hands like he was trying to get water off them. Then he walked over to a bar loaded to seventy kilos and did his first set of snatches. So much for a thorough dynamic stretch routine prior to working out!

Aside from jokes about his mass and his stretching, it was easy to see why he was a great weightlifter as he progressed through his snatches. His technique was impeccable and every single lift looked exactly the same. Same positions, same speed, same apparent level of effort from seventy kilos all the way up to 170. His competition attempts were 180, 185, 190 and they looked exactly the same as the first set I had seen him do in the warm-up room. The strength of this man was mind-bending. Nothing changed about his attitude, his facial expression, or his state of calm. After the snatches were over, the
C&J warm-ups started. This is where I got to see what so many people had talked about for the previous two years.

I’m referring to Chemerkin’s clean and jerk technique. Beginning around 1997, Andrei had caused a lot of controversy in the weightlifting world because of a change in the way he performed the C&J. The basic explanation of it is that he no longer caught his cleans on his shoulders. He would go through the pulling movement of the clean and then, during the turnover phase, he would simply turn his wrists over and hold the bar about three inches off his shoulders. Imagine what it would look like if an athlete was holding a clean on their shoulders and then began to press the bar overhead. The position of the bar when it rose to the level of the Adam’s apple, that’s where Andrei held the bar in the cleans. He would stand up from the squat, go through the normal dip/drive of the jerk, and jerk the bar overhead for a completed lift. At no time during the lift had the bar touched his body, except for the hip drive during the pull. This was freaky to look at and it obviously contradicted a number of rules for proper weightlifting technique. Most people attributed the change in his technique to increased bodyweight. When Andrei won the 1996 Olympics, he weighed 165 kilos and his physique was relatively proportional. However, he began to add several kilos in the following years and, by the 1999 World Championship, he weighed 181 kilos (just under 400 pounds). Much of this additional mass had developed in his upper body. Because of the huge increase in the size of his shoulders and arms, he simply lost the flexibility to hold a clean on his shoulders.

Sounds like a problem, right? Most coaches would tell athletes in this position to lose some weight or do some stretching to fix the flexibility problem in their upper body. I mean, you have to be able to hold the bar on your shoulders to do a clean and jerk, correct? That’s where the dilemma started with Chemerkin. This man, believe it or not, could clean and jerk around 250 kilos using this technique. It may sound unbelievable, but I stood next to the competition platform in Montreal that day when Andrei made his last C&J of 230 kilos, and I can positively verify that the bar never touched his shoulders. Not even in the jerk dip! He literally held the bar around the level of his chin through the entire lift. Right or wrong, it was a feat of strength from another universe. Moreover, he had been lifting like that since 1998 and he had continued to win world championships. Despite the fact that his technique violated almost every rule of weightlifting (and physics), the man could still beat anybody on the planet. How could anybody tell him to fix anything?

TIME FOR SOME KIBITZING

In my humble opinion, Andrei fell victim to complacency during this process. He was the best lifter in the world and, for three years, nobody could touch him even if he was lifting with an atrocious technical error. Randall Strossen once approached him in the training hall of a world championship and asked him why he was clean and jerking this way. Chemerkin just smiled, pounded his shoulder with his fist and said, “Strong!” I believe the man saw himself as untouchable, regardless of any mistakes he was making. After his Atlanta victory, he did an interview with World Weightlifting magazine. In response to the question “What do you think of your future chances?” Andrei’s response was, “I believe that at the next Olympic Games I will have an easier job than in Atlanta.” He actually thought that his competition was going to get softer! However, we all know how this ride ended. A few months after Montreal, Andrei competed in the 2000 Sydney Olympics and got annihilated. Hossein Rezazedeh began his historic reign by winning the gold with a phenomenal 472.5 total. Ronny Weller, Chemerkin’s former bridesmaid, won the silver with 467.5, and Armenian Ashot Danielyan won the bronze, leaving Chemerkin in fourth place. The untouchable champion had been shut out of the medals, completely. Eventually, Danielyan’s drug test returned positive and he was forced to relinquish his bronze medal to Chemerkin. But regardless, it was a brutal thrashing for a man who many had thought was unbeatable.

So, what can we learn from this?

On the day of the Montreal competition, the sports page of the local newspaper featured an extensive interview with Chemerkin. The headline of the article was a quote from the champion that read, “THE DREAM OF EVERYONE IS TO DEFEAT ME.”

After the competition, a teammate of mine approached Andrei and gave him a USA weightlifting pin as a gesture of sportsmanship. Andrei took the pin, glanced at it, and then handed it to somebody else without even acknowledging my teammate.

The man was not modest or humble, or even gracious to his fellow competitors. These are qualities that are, for better or for worse, very common in great champions like Chemerkin. I’ve heard many stories about Vasily Alexeev that make Chemerkin sound like a contender for Miss Congeniality. Having a healthy dose of ego is an essential ingredient to being great at something. However, there is a caveat to it.

I believe Chemerkin became comfortable with the idea that nobody could beat him. Comfort is the enemy of progress. From my perspective, and this is just one man’s opinion, that comfort level laid the foundation for some laziness. Now, can we call a man “lazy” if he is winning world championships? The answer to that question is YES because laziness begins as soon as the individual stops paying attention to all the little details. Some writers have referred to this concept as “believing your own headlines.” Andrei’s bodyweight increase, from 363 pounds when he won the gold medal in Atlanta to 400 pounds three years later, clearly did not work to his benefit. Basic understanding of physiology tells us that giant increases in bodymass can potentially restrict flexibility, which is especially problematic in a sport that is as dependent on flexibility as weightlifting is. Andrei’s upper-body flexibility went in the toilet and he continued to win world championships anyway, with snatches around 200 kilos and jerks around 260 kilos. But he did not make the training adjustments he needed to make to improve his total, and a hungry young Iranian lion was training Clubber Lang-style for the moment when he would have the chance to steal Chemerkin’s claim to being the strongest weightlifter in the world. Andrei told a Montreal reporter that the dream of everyone was to defeat him. Those dreams became his worst nightmares before the summer of 2000 ended.

There are two final thoughts to this story. First of all, who am I to critique an Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champion? The man accomplished things that I never did, no doubt about it. This article, in a way, is the mother of all armchair quarterback articles. True, true... But despite these facts, I believe that there are lessons to be learned in everything and I sure as hell believe that the rise and fall of this particular weightlifter has some useful ones.

Second, competing against this colossus was, as I thought it would be, one of the highlights of my career. Although I knew that I had no chance to beat him, it was still a privilege to share the stage with one of the strongest men who has ever touched a barbell. Despite the fact that I think his career could have ended differently if he had taken more careful precautions with the flexibility problems he developed, there is still no doubt about the greatness of his career. Most athletes would sacrifice a limb to have one single moment when they can be identified as the best in the world. Andrei Chemerkin got to spend four years of his life in that moment. His performances were amazing. But, as Tom Hanks said, getting your butt kicked can make you better. Chemerkin kicked a lot of butts from 1997-1999. At the 1999 World Championship, he kicked Hossein Rezazedeh’s butt. Then he went to the 2000 Olympics, the one he had predicted in the interview to be “easier than Atlanta.” Apparently, Reza didn’t get the memo. I guess weightlifting is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.