by Patrick White

The Vancouver Convention Centre would have been a great place to look for furniture movers last weekend.

The venue was hosting the World Weightlifting Championships and its halls were flooded with stout Eastern Europeans genetically predisposed to carrying a couple of La-Z-Boys—or a seven-foot bar of vanadium steel stacked on either end with a few hundred pounds of weights.

The grand finale of the event, the men’s 231 lb.-plus division, was packed with boisterous Iranians waving flags and chanting “Iran, Iran” over top of the loud techno music blaring from convention centre speakers.

The Iranians were there to see fellow countryman Hossein Reza Zadeh, the world record holder in the event.

Reza Zadeh, a 345-pound giant, is a national hero in Iran where weightlifting is the country’s most popular sport. He was promised a car, a house and an island if he won the competition. But he would have to beat out competitors from Ukraine, Bulgaria, the U.S., Latvia, Armenia, Poland, Qatar, Germany and Russia to do so.

When Reza Zadeh took to the platform for the snatch event, the Iranians in the crowd went nuts. When he took his stance on the lifting platform, stared into the back of the convention centre and let out a small grunt, the crowd fell absolutely silent.

The only audible sound was Reza Zadeh’s coach yelling encouragement and the incessant slapping of another competitor’s bulky muscles by a physiotherapist backstage. Candidates at the NDP convention across the street would have done well to take lessons in stage presence from the Iranian giant.

With the awestruck crowd looking on, Reza Zadeh bent down over the bar, took a wide grip, stared once again to the back of the convention centre and launched the 440 lb. over his head and extended his knees—no problem. When he dropped the bar back down to the platform the entire convention centre shook.

So loud was the noise that three Toronto Maple Leafs, Mats Sundin, Gary Roberts and Darcy Tucker, who were sleeping upstairs in the Pan Pacific Hotel, came down to see what the commotion was. Deciding that trying to shut up 350 lb. weightlifters probably wasn’t a good idea, they quickly headed back upstairs.

After finishing third in the snatch, Reza Zadeh’s island seemed in jeopardy. But when chief rival Jaber S. Salem of Qatar pulled out with an injury, all bets were on the big Iranian. In the clean and jerk, where competitors first hoist the bar up to rest on their collar bones before spreading their legs front and back and lifting the bar over their heads, Reza Zadeh showed his dominance by lifting 550 lb. No other competitor would break that barrier. Reza Zadeh later failed in a bid to better his own world record lift of 578.6 lb., but it didn’t matter. He was the new world’s strongest man.

After the event, one competitor expressed awe at Reza Zadeh. “I had a pretty bad day, but he’s pretty amazing,” said Shane Hammon, an American who placed ninth in the event.

Hammon was the shortest man in the competition at 5’8’’, but was also the thickest at 347.58 lb.

The competition ended with Reza Zadeh receiving his gold medal. Presumably the enormous lifter is by now basking on his new island.

The weightlifting championship was one of a number of major sporting events coming to Vancouver over the next few years, scheduled to culminate in 2010 with the Winter Olympics.