George Hackenschmidt

1 August 1877 – 19 February 1968 · Dorpat (Tartu), Estonia → London

George Hackenschmidt — "Hack", "the Russian Lion" — was the most successful crossover between weightlifting and professional wrestling that the iron game produced. A Russian weightlifting champion and European Greco-Roman champion in 1898, he became the first recognised world heavyweight champion of professional wrestling in 1905, and lived to ninety, writing for much of the second half of his life on training, health and philosophy.

At a glance

• Height: 5 ft 9½ in (about 1.76 m), as given for his 1905 match with Alexander Munro; often rounded to 175 cm.
• Weight: 204 lb (93 kg) at the same match; around 100 kg is usually given for his wrestling prime.
• Other measurements (1905): chest 52 in, biceps 19 in, neck 22 in, waist 34 in, thigh 26¾ in.

Origins

Hackenschmidt was born Georg Karl Julius Hackenschmidt in Dorpat (now Tartu), in the Russian Empire's governorate of Livonia, on 1 August 1877 (20 July, Old Style). His father was Baltic German and his mother of Estonian descent. At school in Dorpat he excelled at gymnastics, cycling, running and weightlifting, and after leaving in 1895 he worked as a blacksmith's apprentice in Reval (Tallinn), where he took up wrestling under the influence of Georg Lurich. In 1898 he moved to Saint Petersburg to train under Dr Vladislav Krajewski, whose athletic club was the centre of early Russian weightlifting, and in April that year won the Russian weightlifting championship.

The work

In the summer of 1898 he competed in Vienna, finishing third in the weightlifting championship, a ten-event contest, and winning the open Greco-Roman wrestling championship. He won tournaments in Russia and Paris over the next few years, and from 1903, managed in England by the impresario C. B. Cochran, became the leading attraction of a music-hall wrestling boom. In 1905 he beat the American Tom Jenkins at Madison Square Garden under catch-as-catch-can rules and was recognised as the first world heavyweight champion. He held the title until 3 April 1908, when Frank Gotch beat him at Dexter Park, Chicago; their rematch at Comiskey Park on 4 September 1911, before nearly 30,000 people, was the most heavily promoted wrestling event of its era, and Hackenschmidt lost again. A knee injury ended his career soon afterwards.

Notable feats

Hackenschmidt's weightlifting career was brief, concentrated in 1896–1900, and the individual records credited to him vary considerably between later compilations; no single list has been firmly established from contemporary sources. What is secure is his competitive record: Russian weightlifting champion in 1898, third in the Vienna weightlifting championship of the same year, and winner of the open Greco-Roman championship there. He is credited with about 3,000 professional wrestling matches and only two defeats, both to Gotch. His name survives in the hack squat, which he is credited with popularising.

Method

The Way to Live in Health and Physical Fitness, first published in London in 1908 and reissued in later editions, is one of the most coherent training texts of the era. It sets out a programme of exercises at moderate weights alongside walking, breathing, cold bathing and a plain diet. Hackenschmidt ate heavily in his wrestling years, reduced his meat intake from about 1906, and became a strict vegetarian after retiring from the ring.

Legacy

Hackenschmidt's wrestling celebrity is what his contemporaries remembered him for; his writing is what survives. After retiring he lived mainly in London. He was interned in Germany during the First World War, spent the Second in France, and became a British subject after it. He wrote on philosophy as well as fitness, including Man and Cosmic Antagonism to Mind and Spirit (1935) and Consciousness and Character (1937), taught physical training, and was a judge at the 1948 Mr Universe contest in London won by John Grimek. He died in London on 19 February 1968, aged ninety. A scrapbook of nearly 600 pages that he kept for decades is held, in digitised form, by the H. J. Lutcher Stark Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Disputed and unresolved

The 1911 rematch with Gotch remains the most argued episode of his career: Hackenschmidt entered it with a knee injury sustained in training, and accounts differ over how it happened and how much it mattered. His weightlifting figures are softer ground than his wrestling record, and specific numbers quoted for his lifts should be treated as approximate.

His nationality is variously given as Estonian, Russian, German and British. The accurate sequence is: born in Dorpat under the Russian Empire to a Baltic German father and Estonian mother, a Russian subject during his career, and a British subject after the Second World War.