A light rain was falling over Moscow’s Gorky Park on the evening of June 15, 1955. In those early years of the Cold War, the overhanging gloom was not due entirely to the weather. The monster Joseph Stalin was dead, but the machine of oppression he had erected was very much alive, now under the direction of a vigorous new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Brash and full of confidence in the Soviet system, Khrushchev intended to demonstrate the superiority of communism, and was willing to draw back the Iron Curtain to prove his point. Assembled in Gorky Park that rainy June evening, more than 16,000 Russians awaited a remarkable event, the first-ever American athletic delegation to visit the Soviet Union to compete with the Soviets in a sanctioned event: a weightlifting competition.

In the Soviet Union, weightlifting enjoyed a prestige similar to chess. It was something the Russians excelled at, and into which the Soviet Communist Party poured enormous resources. By the mid-1950s, the Soviets had already discovered the dubious benefits of anabolic steroids, with resulting massive gains in strength that Western athletes were unable to match. The king of Russian weightlifters in those days was Alexey Medvedev, the Soviet champion, soon to become the European and world champion. Medvedev set the tone at the event with an astounding clean and press of 330 pounds, which tied an Olympic record. One by one, the other weightlifters from both sides performed their lifts. In those days, three lifts were performed at Olympic-style competitions: the familiar snatch (in which the weight is cleared over the head in a single continuous movement), the clean and jerk, and the now-discontinued clean and press, in which the weight is cleared from the floor and then pressed directly overhead without any lower body movement. As expected, the Soviet lifters, well-coached and with flawless form, outperformed their American rivals one by one, until only one American remained.

At the very end of the competition, a stocky young man who had joined the American team at the last moment, and who had only been lifting competitively for a short time, stepped up on the stage. Standing 5'10" and lacking the muscular definition of a bodybuilder, the young man, whose name was Paul Anderson, looked overweight and clumsy. He used no performance-enhancing drugs, had no coaches, and seldom trained with professional equipment. No one in that vast audience of weightlifting afficionados had ever heard of him. To the amusement of the judges and spectators, he requested that 402 pounds be loaded on the bar for his very first lift, the clean and press. This was more than 20 pounds more than the official world record for that lift, and 70 pounds more than Medvedev’s record-tying lift earlier in the evening.

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