Louis Cyr

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

Louis Cyr was, for most of the 1890s, the most famous strongman in North America. A heavy man of modest height, he specialised in the back-lift, horse-resisting and lifts with thick-handled dumbbells, and gave some 2,500 performances in Canada, the United States and Britain without meeting his match. Several of his figures have been inflated in retelling; the core of them is well documented.

At a glance

• Was he real? Yes. Cyr is thoroughly documented in the Québec and American press of his day, in the memoirs he dictated to La Presse in 1908, and in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Canada named him a person of national historic significance in 1976.
• Height: about 5 ft 8½ in (1.74 m), as measured by Dudley Sargent of Harvard in 1895 and again at the Beaupré match in 1901.
• Weight: 291 lb (132 kg) at Sargent's measurement in 1895; 365 lb (166 kg) in 1901; heavier still in his last years. Figures between roughly 270 and 400 lb are recorded at different points of his career.

Origins

Cyr was born Cyprien-Noé Cyr in Saint-Cyprien-de-Napierville, a Québec farming village south of Montréal, on 10 October 1863, the second of fifteen children of Pierre Cyr, a farmer, and Philomène Berger. He had little schooling and from about the age of twelve worked winters in lumber camps and the rest of the year on the family farm. In November 1878, when he was fifteen, the family emigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, where Cyr worked in a textile mill and began calling himself Louis. In 1882 he married Mélina Comtois at Saint-Jean-de-Matha; their daughter Emiliana was born in 1887.

His first notices came in Lowell, where before he was twenty he raised a stone reported at 517 lb to his shoulder before a large crowd. After an unprofitable tour of the Maritimes in 1883 he worked as a policeman and fireman in Sainte-Cunégonde, Montréal, from 1884 until December 1885. On 16 March 1886, at Quebec City, he defeated the reigning Canadian champion David Michaud, and from then on was recognised as the strongest man in Canada.

The work

In December 1890 Cyr lifted before journalists at the New York offices of Richard K. Fox's National Police Gazette, and Fox's backing took him to Britain, where he toured from November 1891 to March 1892, appearing in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and London. He never met Eugen Sandow: the two issued challenges but failed to agree terms. Back in North America he toured with his own troupe, joined John Robinson's Circus in 1897 and was the principal attraction of the Ringling Brothers' circus in 1898, then ran his own circus in Québec from 1899 to 1905. Diagnosed with Bright's disease (chronic nephritis) in 1901, he retired after a drawn match with the young Hector Décarie at Sohmer Park in February 1906, and died in Montréal on 10 November 1912, aged forty-nine.

Notable feats

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

• Back-lift of a platform loaded with eighteen men, Austin & Stone's Museum, Boston, 27 May 1895. Contemporary reports put the load at about 4,300 lb (1,950 kg); the figure usually repeated is 4,337 lb. His earlier back-lift of 3,536 lb at Berthierville in 1888 is also recorded.
• One-arm lift of a 273¼-lb (124 kg) dumbbell, cleaned to the shoulder with both hands and then pushed overhead with one, at the Royal Aquarium, London, on 19 February 1892.
• One-finger lift: figures of 534 to 553 lb are given in later accounts; at his first Montréal show he was reported to have lifted 450 lb with one finger.
• Resisting four draught horses, two on each arm, at Sohmer Park, Montréal, in September 1891, repeated on several evenings.
• Seven records in one evening at St Louis Hall, Chicago, on 8 May 1896.

The back-lift was performed in the style of the period: the lifter stood under a platform set on trestles and raised it, with its load, just clear of the supports by straightening his legs and back. By any modern definition this is a partial lift, but it was a recognised category in Cyr's era, and the Boston lift was described in the New York Clipper as "a new record for this style of lifting".

Method

Cyr left no training manual. What is known of his habits comes from the memoirs serialised in La Presse in 1908, from Ben Weider's biography, and from later researchers such as Paul Ohl. He worked chiefly on the heavy implements he used on stage — the platform, the horse harness, the thick-handled dumbbell — and was famous for his appetite, which contributed to the weight gain and ill health of his later years.

Legacy

Cyr remains the central figure in the Québécois strength tradition. One of his globe dumbbells, 202 lb (92 kg) empty, later passed to Bob Hoffman's York Barbell Company, where it was lifted by Hoffman, Sig Klein and John Grimek; the modern thick-handled "Cyr dumbbell" of strongman competition takes its name from him. Montréal's Parc Louis-Cyr and the Place des Hommes-Forts in Saint-Henri, where a statue of him by Robert Pelletier stands, are named in his honour, and the Maison Louis-Cyr museum is at Saint-Jean-de-Matha, where he is buried. He was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1955, and Antoine Bertrand played him in Daniel Roby's 2013 film Louis Cyr, l'homme le plus fort du monde.

Disputed and unresolved

Cyr's contests with rivals — Horace Barré, Frank Bienkowski ("Cyclops"), Sebastian Miller, August Johnson and others — were reported in a partisan press and rarely under fixed rules. The back-lift figure varies between accounts: 4,300 lb in contemporary reports, 4,337 lb in most later ones, and some writers have questioned whether eighteen men and the platform could have weighed so much. The one-finger figures, likewise, vary by more than 100 lb from source to source. His measurements were also inflated by later biographers: Sargent's 1895 figures are the most conservative, while Weider gave considerably larger arm and calf girths.

His bodyweight changed greatly over his career, which explains the spread of figures in print: 291 lb at Sargent's 1895 measurement, 365 lb at the Beaupré match in 1901, and reportedly about 400 lb by 1904.