A meat and potatoes discipline can survive without the meat. There’s a good video on YouTube that went up in 2015 where a big guy with Harry Potter glasses easily lifts a weight off the floor, not breaking a sweat. In a dusty, windowless gym, he picks up a barbell, loaded, the chyron says, to 100 kilos - his bodyweight. The lifter, named Clarence Kennedy, rips it off the ground, onto his clavicles, then all above his head for a second or two, before it drops. Then he increases the weight. The motion, called the clean and jerk, is one of the two main Olympic lifts, and to be done right, it needs to be fast. Watching the video 100 times, as I have, reveals a lesson about form: it’s mostly but not all legs, and the bar doesn’t get too high and stays close to the body. Near the video’s end, Kennedy, who holds Irish national records as a competitive weightlifter, and has retired from international competition, lifts 220 kilos.
The weight, teased in the video’s headline, is within spitting distance of his weight class’ world record. On a good day in Tokyo and with some luck, Kennedy, if he lost a few pounds, might nail it again, and earn a place on the podium. There are a number of surprising things in the video. One, he’s retired and has opted to train in his gym. Which is another surprise: with beat-up bumper plates, it’s anonymous, and away from the sport’s power centers. Kennedy has subscribers, but he lifts just for video. It’s private, and real, but feels like a samurai sword gone to rust in a scabbard. But the wildest thing might be that he’s vegan. For most of its advertised history, strength sports and animal protein have been joined at the hip. It’s a meat and potatoes discipline, where steaks build up muscles, and whey powder grows them. Sports like powerlifting used to be sold, and defined, as violent pastimes and displays of force