At this point it’s kind of hard to figure out if the rivalry between the Strongest Man on Earth™ and the second Strongest Man on Earth is genuine or just really good marketing, but another shot has been fired in the ongoing machismo-off between Hafthor Bjornsson and Eddie Hall.
Hall beat Bjornsson by a single rep at last year’s World’s Strongest Man, a result that the Icelandic giant publicly disputed. Hall addressed the controversy by simply stating, “At the end of the day, he got his arse handed to him in a strongman competition and the little pussy cat can’t take it.”
But besides being the reigning World’s Strongest Man, Hall is well known as the only man to have ever deadlifted 500 kilograms.
During the lift his face spurted blood and in an interview with BarBend he said that in the following days he went partially blind, bled out of his eyes and ears, and experienced memory loss.
In short, a 500-kilogram deadlift doesn’t sound fun, but along with taking the WSM title, Hafthor Bjornsson seems pretty set on beating the record. He’s been slowly building up his strength and his latest PR was the heaviest deadlift ever made on an elephant bar, which is longer than your conventional bar. He pulled 472 kilograms (1,040.6 pounds) and in a pretty cool new video he posted to his Instagram, Bjornsson said it: he thinks he can beat the world record.
When one commenter asked how much he thinks he would be able to lift “fresh” in a deadlift suit, he said:
It’s worth pointing out that every time Bjornsson posts a deadlift PR, Hall tends to reply with something minimizing the feat. For example, when The Mountain pulled a 455kg PR in February, Hall posted an old clip of a raw 463kg deadlift with the caption, “Just going to leave this here… 463kg….. from 3 years ago!”
That said, Hall did say after Bjornsson’s elephant bar record that, “If he pulls 500kg or wins WSM I’ll be the first to say well done and shake his hand.”
Maybe we’ll find out if that’s true soon enough.
Featured image via @thorbjornsson and @roguefitness on Instagram.
