Apollon

21 January 1862 – 18 September 1928 · Marsillargues, Hérault → Paris

Louis Uni, who performed as Apollon, was the most physically imposing of the French music-hall strongmen of the late nineteenth century. He stood roughly 6 ft 3 in (191 cm) and weighed 270 lb (122 kg) at his peak. He left no training book and few direct lifting records, but he left an implement: a pair of railway-axle dumbbells that defeated every challenger for thirty years and gave the iron game one of its most enduring tests.

Origins

Uni was born in Marsillargues, a small commune in the Hérault region of southern France, in January 1862. His father was a butcher; his mother kept the household. He was unusually tall and broad as a teenager and was already lifting the iron weights used in the local fairs by his late teens. He moved to Paris in his early twenties, found work as a wrestler and circus performer, and adopted the stage name Apollon — for the Greek god, more or less — around 1886.

The work

Apollon performed across the French and Belgian music-hall circuit through the 1890s and into the 1900s, with stints in Britain and one tour of North America. His act was built on raw weight rather than dexterity. He carried a small horse around the stage on a platform; he supported, on a platform across his shoulders, a quartet of musicians playing through their set; he lifted barbells over his head with the slow, grinding press that the French circuit favoured. He was, in the contemporary phrase, the strongest of the music-hall strongmen and the least quick.

Notable feats

Apollon's dumbbells — a pair of solid railway-truck wheels mounted on a length of axle — were brought into the act around 1890. The pair weighed 366 lb (166 kg) together, with a thick axle handle of approximately 1.93 in (49 mm) diameter that had not been turned down for grip. He used them in his stage finale, picked up by stooping and rolling them onto his shoulders; he never to public knowledge attempted them as a clean-and-jerk or as a snatch, and is unlikely to have done so. After his retirement the dumbbells passed through several hands before being acquired in the 1920s by the French federation, where they became a standing challenge.

The figures attached to Apollon himself, as distinct from his bell, are partial:

• Two-hands continental press of approximately 341 lb (155 kg), reported in Paris around 1895.
• One-arm bent press of approximately 220 lb (100 kg), seen by Edmond Desbonnet on multiple occasions.
• Lifting and carrying his "stage horse" — a small Camargue mare on a platform — across the music-hall stage.

Compared with Saxon, Cyr, or Hackenschmidt, his measurable record is thin. The implement is the record.

"On vit Apollon arriver, et l'on cessa de parler de force." — "Apollon walked on, and the conversation about strength stopped."

Method

Edmond Desbonnet, the French strength promoter and chronicler who knew Apollon personally, wrote that Uni trained sporadically and almost never with light weights. He worked the stage implements themselves, repeated the routines he was paid to perform, and otherwise rested. Desbonnet's Les rois de la force (1911) presents Apollon as the antithesis of the methodical Sandow tradition: a man whose strength was constitutional rather than constructed.

Legacy

Apollon's Wheels are the legacy. After Uni's retirement in the 1910s the implement was kept in Paris, occasionally exhibited, and offered as a challenge. Charles Rigoulot — Olympic gold medallist and student of Desbonnet — became, in 1930, the first lifter known to clean the bell from the floor to the shoulders. He repeated the lift in subsequent years. After Rigoulot, the next to clean and jerk the original wheels was John Davis, the American Olympic champion, in 1949. Several modern strongmen and Olympic lifters — Norbert Schemansky, Jean Dabonneville, Mark Henry, Ilkka Kinnunen, Žydrūnas Savickas — have lifted them or replicas in subsequent decades. The original wheels are now held by the Musée de la Force in Paris.

Disputed and unresolved

Apollon's exact bodyweight, height, and the figures for his stage lifts vary considerably between sources. Desbonnet, the most reliable contemporary, gives his peak weight at 122 kg and his height at 1.91 m, but English-language popular accounts have him as tall as 6 ft 5 in and as heavy as 290 lb. The narrative that he could clean and press his wheels overhead, occasionally seen in twentieth-century strength magazines, has no contemporary basis: even Desbonnet, who would not have understated him, records only that he raised them to the shoulders.

The dumbbells themselves have been re-handled, repaired, and copied so many times that the question of "the original Apollon's Wheels" is partly philosophical. The pair held in Paris is descended in unbroken custody from the implement Rigoulot lifted in 1930.