Weightlifting 3:
Weightlifting in the U. S.
The man who did the most to revive American weightlifting after Windship's death was Alan Calvert. In 1893, when he was 18, Calvert saw a performance by Eugen Sandow at Columbian Exposition in Chicago and became a convert.
Because it was hard to find equipment, Calvert in 1902 founded the Milo Barbell Company. He also began publishing a promotional pamphlet called Strength, which became a full-scale subscription magazine in 1914.
Calvert sold both the business and the publication in 1919, but he continued to be involved with the editorial side of Strength during the early 1920s. He was one of the founders of the American Continental Weight-Lifters Association (ACWLA) in 1922, with George Jowett, who had become the editor of Strength, and Bernard Bernard, editor of Life and Health.
The first national championship was held in Los Angeles in 1924, using the same five lifts as in the Olympics that year.
During the late 1920s, the ACWLA was challenged by the Association of Bar-Bell Men (ABBM). The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) took over control of the sport, holding its first national championship in 1929. The ACWLA and the ABBM both folded soon afterward.
The Amateur Sports Act of 1978 required that each Olympic sport have its own national governing body. As a result, the U. S. Weightlifting Federation (now USA Weightlifting) was founded in 1979 to take over from the AAU.
Calvert's successor as the foremost promoter of American weightlifting was Bob Hoffman. The owner of an oil burner manufacturing company in York, Pennsylvania, Hoffman became interested in the sport about 1930. In 1932, his company began manufacturing barbells as well as oil burners. Hoffman also began publishing a weightlifting magazine, Strength and Health, with Jowett as his editor.
When Milo Barbell went into bankruptcy in 1935, Hoffman bought its assets. For more than a quarter-century, Hoffman recruited America's top weightlifters and gave them jobs with York Barbell so they could train there.
When the U. S. won its first world championship in 1946, four of its six lifters worked for York. The following year, the world championships were held in Philadelphia, largely because Hoffman paid $10,000 in travel expenses for foreign competitors and donated $25,000 for running the meet. The U. S. won all six weight classes.
Hoffman spent another $20,000 training the team for the 1948 Olympics, where the U. S. won four individual Gold Medals and the team championship.
After the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites got involved in international weightlifting, Hoffman no longer had the money to keep the United States team competitive. So he began a search for short cuts to victory.
First was a "miracle food" called "Hoffman's Hi-Proteen," basically a soy protein drink with chocolate flavoring, developed in 1953. The Soviet Union won the world team championship that year and again in 1954. Hoffman then came up with an exercise technique called functional isometric contraction.
Introduced in 1961, the exercise program seemed much more miraculous than Hi-Proteen. Three lifters in particular, Tony Garcy, Bill March and Louis Riecke, showed dramatic increases in the amount of weight they were able to handle after switching to functional isometrics.
Evidently, Hoffman was at first unaware that March and Riecke were taking anabolic steroids under the guidance of Dr. John B. Ziegler, York Barbell's team physician. At the 1954 world championships in Vienna, Ziegler had learned that Soviet weightlifters were using testosterone. He then began working with Ciba Pharmaceuticals to develop a chemical that would have the muscle-building qualities of testosterone without the side effects caused by hormonal imbalance.
In 1958, Ziegler came up with methandrostenolone, which Ciba marketed under the tradename of Dianabol. Its chief medical use was to promote healing in burn victims but Ziegler, of course, was interested mainly in its anabolic qualities.
Ziegler tested Dianabol on himself and decided it was both safe and effective. He then began giving it to March and Riecke, who were also doing functional isometric contraction exercises. After taking steroids for five weeks, Riecke's personal best for the three Olympic lifts had improved by 50 pounds. Garcy did even better, improving by 100 pounds after just two months.
Other lifters who were doing the exercises wondered why they weren't showing the same kind of improvement. In 1962, some of them went to York to find out why.
In a 1983 Sports Illustrated article, Terry Todd recalled the visit to York: "Finally they [York weightlifters] showed me a small brown bottle that contained 100 five-milligram tablets of Dianabol. 'This is the secret,' they told me. 'It's these little pink pills, not the isometric contraction.'"
However, Ziegler never fully realized that, because his experiments were completely uncontrolled. He mixed steroids with Hoffman's exercise program and hypnotism, and he tended to give hypnotism most of the credit for the results.
Similarly, Hoffman discounted the effects of steroids after he found out about them. Naturally, he felt his exercises were producing the increases in strength and lifting ability.
Over the 11-year period from 1946 through 1956, the U. S. won 38 of 70 individual world and Olympic championships and seven team championships, largely because of about $300,000 in subsidies from Hoffman.
The 1960 Olympics represented the last gasp for American supremacy in international weightlifting. Bantamweight Charles Vinci was the only gold medalist from the United States. The Soviet Union won five of the other six weight classes.
The Soviets and their Eastern European satellites were willing to spend a lot of money and effort developing world-class athletes in many sports in order to demonstrate the superiority of their political and economic system. Hoffman tried for quite a while, but he simply couldn't compete with the Soviet Union.
Compounding the problems faced by Hoffman and York Barbell, Olympic weightlifting was losing athletes to relatively new sports, bodybuilding and powerlifting.
As a result, Hoffman's empire was facing a serious challenge from Joe and Ben Weider, the founders of the International Federation of BodyBuilders. Like Hoffman, the Weiders published a magazine and sold equipment and nutritional supplements.
Hoffman and York remained at the center of American weightlifting through the 1960s, but the United States was no longer an international power in the sport. The world and Olympic champions of the past had retired from competition and Hoffman couldn't recruit replacements of the same caliber.
Although York Barbell kept manufacturing weightlifting equipment (and does to this day), Hoffman stopped sponsoring the sport during the 1970s and began promoting softball instead.