Ukrainian weightlifter, Olympic gold medalist, and occasional ballerina Aleksey Torokhtiy just posted a clip of a training session in which he power jerks a huge 250 kilograms.
This is a pretty darn serious accomplishment in its own right — the clean & jerk world record for Torokhtiy’s -105kg weight class is 246 kilograms (542.3 pounds), set by Ilya Ilyin in 2015. They’re not the same lifts, of course, but there are very, very few human beings out of the superheavyweight class who have ever put this much weight overhead.
Which makes it all the more amazing that Torokhtiy announced on Instagram that he’s planning to power jerk 260 kilograms (573.2lb) at this year’s Reebok CrossFit Games. No, he’s not competing with Fraser and Froning — he’ll be at the Rogue Fitness booth. He wrote:
I count that I will be able to improve the result up to 260kg/573lbs in this exercise and I plan to do the first attempt with this weight at CrossFit Games 2017 in the @roguefitness booth (August, 4). I will be glad to see all who’ll be there. After the Crossfit Games I’ll hold a 1-day seminar on August, 7 in Madison.
As he says, if Torokhtiy makes the lift it would be an all-time PR for him. We think his heaviest ever power jerk thus far was 255 kilograms (562.2 pounds), which he actually did at last year’s Reebok CrossFit Games. Here’s the footage.
While it’s not the kind of lift that international federations keep rankings of, this may have actually been the heaviest power jerk of all time.
We’ve seen a few split jerks at 270kg, though. Ukrainian weightlifter Artem Udachyn was seen power jerking that weight in 2014…
And so was Armenian athlete Ruben Aleksanyan in 2016.
But both of those weightlifters are superheavyweights, performing jerks that are a little less demanding in terms of balance.
So there’s no way to be sure (and again, it isn’t a competition lift), but if Torokhtiy pulls off his lift in August, it’ll probably be a (very unofficial) world record power jerk for the -105kg weight class.
Featured image via @torokhtiy on Instagram.
