IWF120y/31 – 1970: Vasily Alekseyev emerges to glory
Born in January 1942, it was not before being 18 that Vasily Alekseyev started to practice weightlifting. It was a wise decision, as he became the uncontestable star of the 1970s, in the super heavyweight category. The Soviet talent trained with a coach until 1968, but then decided to proceed alone and the results appeared very soon. In 1970, he establishes his first World Record (he would set 80 global marks during his career!) and wins the World Championship title in Columbus (Ohio, USA). It is the start of a golden decade that will include two Olympic titles, in Munich 1972 and Montreal 1976. As the Games were also counted as World Championships, he will therefore establish an extraordinary series of eight consecutive victories at the highest level – 1970 to 1977. In parallel, he is also eight times European champion from 1970 to 1978. He is still today, the most titled lifter in the history of the IWF World Championships. At the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, he overrated his capacity in Snatch and bombed out. He retired from competition immediately after those failed Games. Performance-wise, Alekseyev had no problems during the transition from the three to the two-movement competition (implemented in 1973), having established some landmarks throughout his career – he was the first man to lift more than 600kg in the three movements (press, snatch and clean & jerk), with a personal best and WR of 645kg (in 1972), and more than 400kg in the two-movement competition (445kg being his last WR); the Soviet champion was also the first athlete to successfully perform a C&J of 500 pounds (227kg), in 1970. After his retirement, he remained active as a coach (namely during the 1992 Games in Barcelona), and got involved in politics (he was elected in 1987 to the Soviet Union’s Congress of People’s Deputies). He passed away in 2011, after serious heart problems. One of his two sons, Dmitry, was also a national-level successful weightlifter.
