The Cyr Dumbbell

202 lb (92 kg) empty · loadable with shot · thick handle · Louis Cyr, 1880s–1900s

Louis Cyr lifted with large, hollow, thick-handled globe dumbbells that could be loaded with lead shot. The best known of them weighs 202 lb empty. Its shape gave its name to the modern strongman "Cyr dumbbell" event.

At a glance

• Weight: 202 lb (92 kg) empty; loaded with shot to well over 250 lb.
• Cyr's best-known lift with it: a one-arm clean and press of a dumbbell weighing 273¼ lb, made before some 5,000 spectators at the Royal Aquarium in London on 19 February 1892. The British lifter Tom Pevier, who saw it, described it as more of a "jerk press".
• Where now: Cyr owned more than one such bell. One is at the York Barbell Hall of Fame in York, Pennsylvania; another, donated by Ben Weider, is at the Stark Center at the University of Texas at Austin; another is at the Louis Cyr museum in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Québec.

The York bell

The dumbbell at York came from Joseph Moquin, a Québec police chief who could bent-press it himself and who traded it for a modern York barbell set. At York, Bob Hoffman and Sig Klein both bent-pressed it, according to Strength & Health, and John Grimek bent-pressed it several times with its weight increased to 269½ lb. The story that the extra lead came from melted-down type of a book is a York anecdote rather than a documented fact.

The modern event

In the mid-2010s Rogue Fitness copied the Stark Center's Cyr dumbbell for the Arnold Strongman Classic, and the one-arm Cyr dumbbell press has since become a standard strongman event, now contested with weights heavier than anything Cyr is recorded as lifting.

See also: Louis Cyr · The Inch dumbbell · All implements