Mr. Olympia

The earliest evidence of weightlifting in the ancient Greek world is a sandstone block from Olympia, weighing about 315 pounds, with a pair of deep, smooth grooves worn into the long top side of the stone. The grooves make it possible to picture the event described by the words cut into the rock: “Bybon, son of Phorys, lifted me over his head with one hand.” A similar inscription can be found on a bigger, heavier rock, hundreds of miles away on the island of Santorini. Seven feet long, six feet in circumference, the black volcanic boulder weighs more than 920 pounds and bears this chiseled announcement: “Eumastas, the son of Critobulus, lifted me from the ground.”

Many classicists have been skeptical of the boasts carved on these stones. Few of them have known much about lifting weights. The article “Weightlifting in Antiquity,” the most detailed study of the topic, was published in 1977 by Nigel Crowther, the only classicist of that era who had been a competitive powerlifter. Crowther, now emeritus professor of classical studies at Western University in London, Ontario, contended that both ancient claims are plausible. The stone of Bybon at Olympia, he wrote, is no heavier than barbells hoisted by the 19th-century Prussian strongman Arthur Saxon. The rock of Eumastas on Santorini, he added, could possibly have been raised with a movement resembling the deadlift—at the time of Crowther’s writing, the deadlift world record was a little more than 885 pounds, close to the 920 Eumastas supposedly hoisted. (The record has risen since then. In 2020, in Iceland, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson deadlifted 1,104.5 pounds.)

In the whole of Greece, archaeologists have unearthed only two other stones that show signs of having been used in some way akin to modern weightlifting. Both were found at Olympia, with one of the limestone chunks inscribed, “I am the throwing-stone of Xenareus.” Meanwhile, very little surviving art from ancient Greece portrays anything like heavy weight training or weightlifting.  One painted fragment of a wine cup—possibly from the sixth century BC—shows a slender boy struggling to lift a stone. And yet, ancient Greek art—from seal stones to statuary—depicts a plethora of bulging muscles. So why is there so little written or visual evidence of ancient Greek weightlifting?