This is what happened to Eddie Hall when he broke the world dead-lift record. He was on stage at the Leeds Arena in April 2016, faced with lifting 500 kilograms, roughly the weight of a fully-grown polar bear. Three men were competing to see if they could do it. The first competitor tore his hamstring in the warm-up and never lifted a thing. The second ruptured something major in his first attempt. Then Hall stepped forward and, with a roar, hoisted the steel bar as it bent under its colossal, half-tonne load. As the 11,000-strong audience cheered him, he fainted. He woke up on the floor, with blood seeping out of his mouth, his nose, his eyes.
“My blood pressure was well over 200,” he recalls. “It could have killed me.” He had proved himself the Roger Bannister of dead-lifting, breaking a record long deemed beyond human capability, and nearly died in the process. It might be thought by most of us a good point to stop. But for Hall that was just the start. Now he has set himself on a path to become the biggest draw in British sport. And after that, if his manager Mo Chaudry has his way, to use his renown to bring peace to the world’s trouble spots.
“He can tour the world, spreading the goodwill,” says Chaudry. “I really believe that people will come together with him. He could be a phenomenon.” First, though, there was a small matter Hall needed to resolve.
“When I said I was going to lift 500 kilos, everybody laughed their heads off,” he says, as he sits sipping a protein shake in the Stoke gym where he trains. “Well, I did it. But there was one thing I needed to do to cement that achievement: I had to win the title of the world’s strongest man.”
For years, the World’s Strongest Man has been a staple of the Christmas television schedule. Generations of us have been brought up on the sight of freakishly contoured, usually Scandinavian, giants engaging in ridiculous strength challenges like pulling jetliners or flipping tractor tyres. Hall had watched the competition as a boy, dreaming one day the title might be his.
“For me, there’s two things to call yourself,” he says. “Either the world’s fastest man or the world’s strongest man. I was never going to be the fastest. But I could be the strongest. It’s the most alpha-male title on the planet.” Brought up in the Potteries, Hall had been a champion freestyle swimmer in his youth. When he was 15, installed on the Olympic development programme, however, he walked out of the pool, fed up of the demands of coaches. Soon after, he was excluded from school.
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