Eugen Sandow

2 April 1867 – 14 October 1925 · Königsberg, Prussia → London

If the iron game has a single hinge, it is Sandow. A Prussian-born music-hall strongman, he turned the display of a trained physique into popular entertainment, sold exercise by mail and magazine, staged the first major bodybuilding contest in 1901, and gave his likeness to the statuette presented to every Mr. Olympia since 1977.

Origins

Sandow was born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad), on 2 April 1867. His father was German and his mother of Russian descent; the family was Lutheran and hoped he would enter the ministry. He left Prussia in 1885, in part to avoid military service, and worked his way through Europe as a circus athlete, taking the stage name Eugen Sandow from a Germanised form of his mother's maiden name. In Brussels he trained at the gymnasium of Ludwig Durlacher, the strongman known as Professor Attila, who became his mentor and in 1889 encouraged him to go to London.

The work

In London in late 1889 Sandow answered the public challenge of the strongman Charles Sampson ("Samson"), who offered a prize to anyone who could repeat his feats, and beat him at the Royal Aquarium. The victory made him a celebrity, and further contests, including one against Henry McCann, followed. In 1893 Florenz Ziegfeld engaged him for the Trocadero in Chicago during the World's Columbian Exposition; Ziegfeld found that audiences cared more for Sandow's physique than for the weights, and built the act around posed "muscle display". In 1894 Sandow was filmed for Edison's Kinetoscope, and in the same year he married Blanche Brooks of Manchester, with whom he had two daughters.

Back in England he opened the first of his Institutes of Physical Culture, began publishing books and, in 1898, a monthly magazine, later titled Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture. He toured widely in the following years, including South Africa, India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Notable feats

Sandow's lifting record is harder to reconstruct than his fame would suggest. Many of his stage feats — supporting a platform of people or a horse, chain-breaking, "human dumbbell" stunts — were spectacles rather than measured lifts, and loads varied between venues. His best-known lift is the one-arm bent press, generally credited at around 270 lb (122 kg); Louis Cyr was later said to have beaten it by 2 lb. Sandow's distinction was never to be the strongest man of his day, but to be the most exhibited.

His most lasting performance was off-stage: on 14 September 1901 he staged "The Great Competition" at the Royal Albert Hall, generally considered the first major bodybuilding contest, judged by Sandow with the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The prizes were gold, silver and bronze statuettes of Sandow by the sculptor Frederick Pomeroy.

Method

Sandow's training, as set down in Sandow's System of Physical Training (1894), Strength and How to Obtain It (1897) and Body-Building, or Man in the Making (1904), was based on light dumbbell work performed with close attention to each muscle, with prescribed weights and repetitions intended to build the body towards the proportions of classical sculpture — his "Grecian Ideal". He sold spring-grip dumbbells, chest expanders and a printed course by mail. As serious strength training the system has dated; its importance is that it was among the first to be taken up by the general public.

Legacy

From 1909 Sandow trained would-be recruits to the Territorial Army at his own expense, and did the same for volunteers in the First World War. In 1911 King George V appointed him Special Instructor in Physical Culture. He lived for his last nineteen years at 161 Holland Park Avenue, Kensington, which now carries an English Heritage blue plaque, and he is the subject of studies of the early history of yoga as exercise following his acclaimed 1905 visit to India.

Since 1977 a bronze statuette of Sandow after Pomeroy's figure, known simply as "the Sandow", has been presented to the winner of the Mr. Olympia contest. He was played by Nat Pendleton in The Great Ziegfeld (1936).

Death

Sandow died at his home in Kensington on 14 October 1925, aged fifty-eight. Newspapers reported the cause as a brain haemorrhage; without a post-mortem, the death was certified as due to an aortic aneurysm. The familiar story that he had strained himself two or three years earlier by lifting his car out of a ditch after an accident is told without good contemporary evidence. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Putney Vale Cemetery at his widow's wish; a headstone was added in 2002 and replaced in 2008 by a sandstone monolith inscribed "SANDOW 1867–1925".

Disputed and unresolved

Sandow's published measurements, like those of every strongman of the era, were prepared for sale and should be treated with caution, as should accounts of his contests, which were reported by interested promoters. The claim, repeated in Katie Sandwina's publicity, that she outlifted him in New York in 1902 rests on her own later story. His nationality is also commonly muddled: he was Prussian by birth, is often described as German because Prussia became part of the German Empire in 1871, and spent his career and later life in Britain.