Louis Cyr

10 October 1863 – 10 November 1912 · Saint-Cyprien-de-Napierville, Québec

Louis Cyr was, for nearly two decades around the turn of the century, the most famous strongman in North America. He was a heavy man — over 300 lb (136 kg) for most of his career — and he lifted in the heaviest categories of the day: back-lifts, harness lifts, thick-handled dumbbells, and standing platform stunts. His best figures remain partly contested. They have not been clearly bettered.

Origins

Cyr was born Cyprien-Noé Cyr in Saint-Cyprien-de-Napierville, a Québec farming village south of Montréal, on 10 October 1863. His mother, Philomène, was unusually tall and physically strong herself, and his father a farmer. The family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts when Cyr was twelve so that the children could find work in the textile mills. Cyr worked as a lumberjack and a teamster in his teens, and by his late teens was performing in local strength contests. He returned to Québec in his early twenties, served briefly as a Montréal policeman, and turned full-time professional after winning a public lifting match against the Canadian strongman David Michaud in 1885.

The work

Cyr toured Québec and New England through the 1880s and 1890s, beat the leading American strongmen of the day in a series of public matches, and was hired in 1894 by the Ringling Brothers and the Barnum & Bailey circuses for tours of the United States and Britain. His act centred on three categories: the back-lift, in which a loaded platform was raised across the lifter's back from trestles; the harness lift, with weights suspended on chains; and one-arm dumbbell lifts with thick handles. He retired from regular performance in 1906, suffering from chronic kidney disease, and died at forty-nine in 1912.

"He was not built; he was assembled. There was no other way to describe a man of that bulk who could be that quick under iron."

Notable feats

The figures most frequently cited from Cyr's career are:

• Back-lift of 4,337 lb (1,967 kg), Sohmer Park, Montréal, 1895. The platform held eighteen men.
• One-finger lift of a 553-lb (251 kg) weight from the floor, Boston, 1896.
• One-hand "dumbbell" of 273 lb (124 kg) lifted from floor to shoulder, witnessed in Chicago, 1896.
• Two-hands "press" of a barbell of 314 lb (142 kg) — actually a continental clean and shoulder lift to the chest, then a slow pressed-out lift overhead.
• Resisting four draught horses, two on each arm, harnessed to his outstretched hands, in Sohmer Park, 1891.

The back-lift figure of 4,337 lb is the one most commonly attached to Cyr's name. The lift was performed in the lifting style of the period: the lifter stood under a platform set on trestles, raised it perhaps an inch or two off the trestles by straightening his legs and back, and held it momentarily before letting it return. By any modern definition this is a partial lift and not a full deadlift, but it was a recognised category in Cyr's era and the weight on the platform was witnessed and weighed. The 1895 figure was reported in the Montréal press at the time and is repeated in Ben Weider's biography.

Method

Cyr left no training manual. What is known of his preparation comes from Ben Weider's biography, from interviews Cyr gave in his later career, and from the recollections of his son-in-law, the strongman Hector Décarie. He trained heavy and irregularly, ate enormously, and is described as having performed almost no light or "developmental" work of the kind Sandow advocated. He preferred to test his strength on the implements he would actually use — the platform, the chain harness, the thick dumbbell — and to leave the rest alone.

Legacy

Cyr remains the central figure in Québécois strength tradition. The Cyr dumbbell — a thick-handled globe dumbbell of 202 lb (92 kg), now in the Stark Center at the University of Texas at Austin — is one of the few of his implements to survive in its original form, and is the parent of the modern "Cyr dumbbell" used in strongman competition. A statue of Cyr stands in the Saint-Henri district of Montréal, near the tavern he ran in retirement. He is the subject of one of the more researched entries in Rogue Fitness's Rogue Legends Series documentaries, which combines archival photographs with interviews with present-day Canadian historians of the game.

Disputed and unresolved

Cyr's contests with rival strongmen — Sandow, Sebastian Miller, August Johnson, Eugen Sandow's pupil "Cyclops" — were almost always reported in the partisan press and almost never under fixed rules. The figure most often disputed is the one-finger lift of 553 lb, which depends critically on the rigging of the ring through which the finger was hooked: a narrow ring is one lift, a broad rope handle another. The back-lift figure has been challenged on the grounds that the platform may have rocked rather than fully cleared the trestles, but no contemporary observer made the objection in writing.

Cyr's bodyweight at his peak is variously given as 310 to 365 lb. The lower figure is the one Cyr used in print; the upper, the one his publicists preferred. A study of surviving photographs and contemporary descriptions in Iron Game History puts the working figure for his strongest years at around 330 lb (150 kg).