Paul Anderson (weightlifter)

Paul Edward Anderson (October 17, 1932 – August 15, 1994) was an American weightlifter, strongman, and powerlifter.

He was an Olympic gold medalist, a world champion, and a two-time national champion in Olympic weightlifting.

Anderson contributed significantly to the development of competitive powerlifting.

Anderson was born in Toccoa, Georgia, the only son of Ethel Bennett and Robert Anderson.

As a teenager, he began his early weight training and training on his own in his family's backyard to increase his size and strength so that he would be able to play on the Toccoa High School football team, where he earned a position as first-team blocking back.

He used special homemade weights that his father created out of concrete poured into a wooden form.

Anderson attended Furman University on a football scholarship, where he began lifting weights.

He later moved to Elizabethton, Tennessee, with his parents, where he met weightlifter Bob Peoples, who would greatly influence him in squat training and introduce him into weightlifting circles.

In 1950, Anderson married Glenda Garland.

The couple were devout Christians.

In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, Anderson, as winner of the USA National Amateur Athletic Union Weightlifting Championship, traveled to the Soviet Union, where weightlifting was a popular sport, for an international weightlifting competition.

In a newsreel of the event shown in the United States the narrator, Bud Palmer, commented as follows: "Then, up to the bar stepped a great ball of a man, Paul Anderson."

Palmer said, "The Russians snickered as Anderson gripped the bar, which was set at 402.5 pounds, an unheard-of lift. But their snickers quickly changed to awe and all-out cheers as up went the bar and Anderson lifted the heaviest weight overhead of any human in history."

"We rarely have such weights lifted," said the solemn Russian announcer as Anderson hoisted 402.41 lb in the two-hand press.

Prior to Anderson's lift, the Soviet champion, Alexey Medvedev, had matched the Olympic record of the time with a 330.3 lb press.

Anderson then did a 402.5 lb press.

At a time when Americans were engaged in a symbolic Cold War battle with the Soviet Union, Anderson's strength — and his singular, tank-like appearance — became a rallying cry to all.

During the 1955 World Championships in Munich, Germany, that October, Anderson went on to establish two other world records (for the press [407.7 lb] and total weight cleared [1129.5 lb]) as he easily won the competition in his weight class to become world champion.

Upon his return to the United States, Anderson was received by then Vice-President Richard Nixon, who thanked him for being a goodwill ambassador.

In 1956, Anderson won a gold medal in a long, tough duel with Argentine Humberto Selvetti in the Melbourne, Australia, Olympic Games as a weightlifter in the super-heavyweight class (while suffering from a 104 F fever).

The two competitors were tied in the amount of weight lifted, but because Anderson, who weighed in at 137.9 kg, was lighter than Selvetti at the time, who weighed 143.5 kg, Anderson was awarded the gold.

Anderson turned professional after the 1956 Summer Olympics, and thus many of his feats of strength, while generally credible, were not done under rigorous enough conditions to be official.

In 1958, Paul tried his hand in professional wrestling.

He wrestled in Chicago most notably wrestling against Bozo Brown in the International Amphitheater on November 7, 1958.

Anderson could not compete in the 1960 Olympics because he had been ruled a professional for accepting money for some of his weightlifting and strength exhibitions, including a stint in professional wrestling.

Thus at the 1960 Olympics the Soviet heavyweight Yury Vlasov bested records set at the 1956 Olympics, with Anderson not competing in the contest.

A short time later, however, not to be outdone by the Ukrainian as the World's Strongest Man, Anderson lifted the same weight as Vlasov three times in quick succession, demonstrating unbelievable strength.

This feat solidified his position as the most dominant lifter in the world and cemented his legacy as the strongest of the strong.

In 1961, Anderson and his wife Glenda founded the Paul Anderson Youth Home, a home for troubled youth, in Vidalia, Georgia.

They both helped to build and support the home with an average of 500 speaking engagements and strength exhibitions per year—notwithstanding the congenital chronic kidney disease that eventually killed him at age 61.

He would perform stunts such as hammering a nail with his bare fist and raising a table loaded with eight men onto his back.

They had one daughter, born 1966.

While competing, Anderson weighed 275 - 370 lb and was 5 ft tall or less.

The Guinness Book of World Records (1985 edition) lists his feat of lifting 6270 lb in a back lift as "the greatest weight ever raised by a human being".

In fact, controversy surrounding the figure in the 1985 Guinness Book led to its withdrawal in subsequent editions; the currently listed Guinness record is 5,340 lbs, set by Gregg Ernst in 1993.

As a child, Anderson suffered from Bright's disease (now known as chronic nephritis), a kidney disorder, and he eventually died from kidney disease on August 15, 1994, at the age of 61.

Anderson's true life testimony can be heard through the Unshackled! radio ministry.

It was first broadcast as program number 2521 and later redramatized as program number 3478.

Unshackled! has also produced a comic booklet telling Anderson's story.

Paul Anderson Memorial Park, located at the corner of East Tugalo Street and Big A Road in Toccoa, is named for Anderson.