Pyotr Krylov

1871 (or 1873) – 1933 · Moscow

Pyotr Fedotovich Krylov — "the king of kettlebells" — was a Russian circus strongman and professional wrestler whose career ran from 1895 into the Soviet period. He is the figure through whom the kettlebell (the Russian girya) entered the iconography of Russian strength culture.

At a glance

• Born in Moscow, in 1871 according to most Russian sources (some give 11 June 1873); died 1933.
• Measured in 1912 by Ludwig Chaplinsky of the Sanitas athletic society at 170 cm (5 ft 7 in) and 90.5 kg (about 200 lb).
• Known for kettlebell work, one-arm bent presses and lifts from the wrestler's bridge.

Origins

Krylov was born in Moscow and, as a boy, haunted the Salamonsky circus, where the strongman Emil Foss became his idol. At about nineteen he entered a navigation school in Saint Petersburg and went to sea, later serving on a ship working between Odessa and Marseille. Visiting Moscow early in 1895 he began training in the cellar gymnasium of Serge Morro (Morro-Dmitriev), and that spring started performing as a strongman.

The work

Krylov began in a fairground booth in Moscow in 1895, performing many times a day, and worked his way up through travelling circuses; at Ufa he worked alongside Sergei Eliseev, his rival in lifting. He later appeared at Baron Kister's arena on Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow, where several of his best-known lifts were made. From 1906, encouraged by the amateur athletes around Ivan Lebedev in Saint Petersburg, he wrestled professionally in the Lebedev championships at the Ciniselli Circus and then toured widely across Russia and Siberia as a wrestler.

His act centred on the kettlebell. Juggling, pressing and swinging the round-handled girya, then a common implement in Russian shops and markets as well as gymnasiums, was the material with which he became identified, and the nickname "king of kettlebells" stuck.

Notable feats

Records credited to Krylov in Russian sources include:

• Press of a barbell from the wrestler's bridge, 123 kg (271 lb), Kister's arena, Moscow, 1898.
• Left-hand bent press of a dumbbell, 110 kg (243 lb), Moscow, 1898; and of a barbell, 115 kg (254 lb), Kiev Athletic Society, 1901.
• A "kettlebell cross" — two kettlebells of 41.4 kg each held out to the sides — Kiev, 1900.
• Two-hands jerk of 133 kg (293 lb), Kiev, 1901.
• Pressing a two-pood (32 kg) kettlebell 86 times with the left hand.

Method

In August 1914 Krylov described his own training in the sporting magazine Gerkules. He warned against training only for records, and described a day of light morning exercise — rubber expanders, push-ups, running, cold water — followed in the evening by repetition work with a barbell of five poods (about 80 kg), two-pood kettlebells and squats, later cut to three heavy sessions a week alternated with wrestling practice. Heavy single attempts he made only once a week.

Legacy

Krylov's place in the Russian strength tradition rests less on his figures, which are not the highest of his generation, than on his identification with the kettlebell. That tradition survived through the Soviet era as a competitive sport (girevoy sport) and was exported as a training method from the 1990s onwards.

Disputed and unresolved

Krylov is sometimes described in English-language writing as a pupil of Vladislav Krajewski; Russian accounts instead name Serge Morro and Ivan Lebedev as his mentors, and place his career in Moscow and the provincial circuses rather than in Krajewski's Saint Petersburg circle. His birth year is given as both 1871 and 1873 (his own statement in 1914 that he was then forty-three fits 1871), and the place of his death is not well established. His lifting figures, like those of most professional strongmen of the period, come from performances rather than supervised contests.