George Hackenschmidt

2 August 1877 – 19 February 1968 · Tartu, Estonia → London

George Hackenschmidt — "Hack," "the Russian Lion" — was the most successful crossover between weightlifting and professional wrestling that the Iron Game produced. He held the world wrestling championship in the early 1900s, set what was then a recognised world record in the two-hands clean, and lived to ninety, writing for most of the second half of his life on training, nutrition, and what he called "rational living."

Origins

Hackenschmidt was born Georg Karl Julius Hackenschmidt in Tartu (then Dorpat), in the Russian-administered governorate of Livonia, on 2 August 1877. The family was Baltic German. He took up gymnastics and weightlifting as a teenager and came under the instruction of Dr Vladislav von Krajewski in Saint Petersburg in his late teens. Krajewski, an amateur and a serious physician, was the central figure in early Russian weightlifting; he tutored a generation of lifters in his apartment gymnasium, including Sergei Eliseev and Pyotr Krylov. Hackenschmidt won the Russian amateur championship in 1898 at the age of twenty-one.

The work

In 1898, in Vienna, Hackenschmidt clean-and-jerked a barbell of 164 kg (361 lb), a figure regarded at the time as the world record in the two-hands lift. He turned to wrestling shortly afterward, with the encouragement of the impresario C. B. Cochran, and made his name in the Greco-Roman and "catch as catch can" forms over the following decade. He won what was billed as the world catch wrestling championship in 1905 by defeating Tom Jenkins at Madison Square Garden. He held the title until his celebrated and disputed match with Frank Gotch in Chicago in 1908, in which Gotch won; a 1911 rematch, also lost by Hackenschmidt, was the most heavily promoted wrestling event of its era.

Notable feats

The figures from Hackenschmidt's lifting career, mostly recorded between 1896 and 1900, include:

• Two-hands clean and jerk of 361 lb (164 kg), Vienna, 1898.
• One-hand snatch of 196 lb (89 kg).
• One-hand "press" of 269 lb (122 kg) — the lift was the bent press, performed under continental rules.
• Two-hands continental "press" of 269 lb (122 kg) at a bodyweight of about 218 lb (99 kg).
• Squat — what was then called the "deep knee bend" — of 251 kg (553 lb) for a single repetition, performed without supports as a contemporary demonstration. The figure is cited in his own training books.

The 361-pound clean was the figure on which his lifting reputation rested. It was performed under continental rules — that is, the bar could be brought to the chest by any means, including a stage between belt and chest, before being jerked overhead — and was witnessed and recorded by Krajewski and the Vienna federation. The number stood as a benchmark for two-hands lifting for some twenty-five years.

Method

The Way to Live, published in London in 1908, is one of the most coherent training texts of the era. It sets out a daily programme of compound exercises performed at moderate weights, walking, breathing, cold bathing, and a vegetarian-leaning diet. Hackenschmidt was an early advocate of the deep knee bend as a fundamental exercise — at a time when it was widely held that squatting under heavy load damaged the knees — and his treatment of the squat in The Way to Live is the earliest mainstream defence of the lift in English. The book had a long second life in mid-century strength culture, was reissued by Bob Hoffman's York Barbell, and is now in the public domain.

"The body is not a machine to be filled and emptied at intervals. It is a continuous process, and what one is asking it to do should be the smallest part of what one is asking it to be."

Legacy

Hackenschmidt's wrestling celebrity is what his contemporaries remembered him for; his writing is what survives. The Way to Live remains the most widely read pre-war strength book after Saxon's. After his retirement from wrestling in 1911 he settled in London, took British nationality, and turned to philosophical writing — The Man and the Cosmic Antagonism to Mind and Spirit (1935) and a sequence of late essays — that placed strength in a wider account of human possibility. He survived both world wars, knew Albert Einstein, and was still walking the streets of Paris in his eighties.

Disputed and unresolved

The match-fix accusations against Hackenschmidt's wrestling career — particularly the second Gotch match — are extensively argued in the wrestling literature; the lifting record is the firmer ground. Some early figures attributed to him (a one-hand jerk of 247 lb, a press behind neck of 293 lb) appear inconsistently in continental sources and are best treated as approximate. The 361-pound clean is the figure that has stood up to a century of scrutiny.

Hackenschmidt's nationality is variously given as Estonian, Russian, German, and British. The accurate sequence is: born in Tartu under Russian administration, ethnically Baltic German, naturalised British in 1950.