After competing in the qualifying events Terry Hollands didn’t make it to the finals of this year’s World’s Strongest Man, but the thirty-eight-year-old has shown that he’s still a world class athlete. In London this week, he set a new world record in the bus pull when he hauled a 12-ton, double decker bus twenty meters in 17.41 seconds. This broke the previous record by five seconds.
Check out how he just ditches the rope as he closes in on the finish line.
He wrote underneath a video of the feat,
So training legs a few days before this with [bodybuilder Kate Errington] was maybe not the best idea but got it done. New wr. 17.41 seconds for 20m with a 12t bus.
He also noted that, as we suggest in our awesome article on the truck pull, he wore rock climbing shoes to perform the task. Why? As strongman and BarBend contributor Mike Gill explains, it’s because they’re designed to wedge into the ground and provide as much grip as possible for a small amount of surface contact.
New strongman world record in #southampton as Terry Hollands hauls a 12 tonne bus 20 metres in just 17.4 seconds! He’s live with us at 1.30 @BBCSouthNews pic.twitter.com/KuMMrkSJK7
— Tony Husband (@TonyHusbandBBC) May 17, 2018
Truck pulls are a pretty tricky to talk about because there’s so much variety. One can have different records for trucks of different weights, numbers of axles, and distances pulled. And two trucks that are identical in all those aspects could still pull differently if they’re a different model, since they’d have different dimensions. It’s hard to keep track of.
Still, beating the previous record for this distance by five whole seconds is no mean feat. (And let’s not forget the guy also competes as a bodybuilder.)
This pull was intended to publicize Hollands’ next appearance at the Ultimate Strongman Summermania event, which will be held in Southampton on June 10.
Competitors will include Hollands, Zydrunas “Big Z” Savickas, Cheick “Iron Biby” Sanou, Mark Felix, Krzysztof Radzikowski, and Martins Licis, and there will be an extra cash prize for anyone who breaks the log lift world record. Despite a lot of hype and a lot of record breaking training lifts, nobody managed to set a new record at Europe’s Strongest Man — maybe this time Big Z will raise the bar. We’re looking forward to the event, in any case.
Featured image via @terryhollandwsm and @dontpanicgeorge on Instagram.
