Scenes from the Front Lines

For several intertwined reasons, our lives have spread across the sport of powerlifting—a type of competitive weightlifting that includes the squat, the bench press, and the dead lift—for the past half century. One of us, Terry, won the superheavyweight class in the first national championships. The other one, Jan, set a national record at the first women’s championships and went on to set world records over five bodyweight divisions. Both of us have coached national and world record holders, coached national teams in world championships, written many dozens of articles on the sport for the popular press, done color commentary for national television networks, and been elected to halls of fame in the sport.

During our time in powerlifting we’ve seen the coming of anabolic steroids and related substances, the entry of women into the sport, its gradual outward movement into countries around the world, and its unprecedented fractionalization into a Babel of federations riven by rancor regarding standards of performance, costumes, and—above all else—drugs. Our unique vantage point, located sometimes inside and sometimes just outside the belly of the beast, has allowed us to be there, like Forrest Gump, when things happened that were wonderful, horrible, or both at the same time. Below, each in his or her own voice, we’ve tried to share a bit of what we’ve seen.

Terry: Ironbound

In 1996, the American weightlifter Mark Henry trained with us at our summer home on Ironbound, a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia. We invited him to come so he could escape the media drawn to his four-hundred-pound body, his equally outsized personality, and his outspoken criticism of the lack of effective drug testing in a sport which had sustained more positive tests than any other Olympic event. Not unexpectedly, however, a few well-heeled TV people persisted, making the effort to reach our retreat.

The “talent” for one media contingent, after the usual song and dance, approached the drug issue via a different path, asking, “Mark, do you ever wonder how much you could lift if you took the same drugs as the other top men?” Mark hesitated for just a moment, and then said in a wistful voice something I’d never heard him say: “No. But I do wonder about one thing. I wonder how much they could lift if they didn’t.”

Jan: Lamar

In the early 1980s, we helped the powerlifter Lamar Gant find a job at a local equipment manufacturer near us, and Terry began to coach him. “Coaching Lamar was easy,” Terry has often said, “since he was already the greatest lifter the sport has ever seen.” A diminutive man with a giant’s strength, Lamar trained with the powerlifting team at Auburn University, a team we coached. We believed, for reasons too complicated to address here, that Lamar was lifetime drug-free and, as such, an ideal role model for our young lifters, one of whom was Terry Ptomey, a uniquely talented undergraduate.

She and Lamar became friends, and he helped me as I worked with her during the run-up to the national women’s championships I was promoting. His help was important because Ptomey’s opponent was one of the first women in the sport who used anabolic steroids and made little attempt to hide either her drug use or her disdain for those who chose to remain drug-free.

The Gymnast, by George Grosz, ca. 1922, oil on canvas, 41×31 1/2 inches, Art ©Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image: ©McNay Art Museum/ Art Resource, NY

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The meet had no drug testing because the men who then governed powerlifting wouldn’t allow it, even though almost all of the women in the sport wanted it. The men—most active lifters who used drugs banned by the International Olympic Committee—feared that if the women were tested, the pressure would mount for the men to be tested. In any event, Ptomey...