Eugen Sandow

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

If the Iron Game has a single hinge, it is Sandow. He was the first lifter to be photographed seriously, the first to industrialise instruction by mail, and the first whose body was treated as the standard against which others would be measured. The bronze statuette awarded each year as the Mr. Olympia trophy is a copy of him.

Origins

Sandow was born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in Königsberg, then the capital of East Prussia, on 2 April 1867. His parents were a greengrocer and a former milliner; the family was comfortable but unremarkable. He left Prussia in his late teens, partly to avoid military conscription, and worked his way through Europe as a circus and music-hall strongman, adopting the stage name Eugen Sandow around 1887. The decisive figure in his early career was Louis Durlacher, who performed and trained others under the name Professor Attila. It was Attila who taught Sandow the bent press and the showman's craft, and Attila who arranged the contest in London in 1889 that launched him.

The work

The London contest was a public challenge issued by the strongman Charles Sampson, who held the British music-hall stage as the strongest man in the world. Sandow, then twenty-two and largely unknown in England, answered the challenge at the Royal Aquarium on 2 November 1889, defeating Sampson in a series of dumbbell and chain-breaking events before a packed house. The press coverage that followed turned him into a sensation overnight. Within weeks he was the headline act on the London variety circuit, and within two years he was touring North America under the management of Florenz Ziegfeld, who exhibited him at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

His act was, by the standards of the era, restrained. Where rivals broke chains by trickery and bent iron of suspect provenance, Sandow performed graded, well-lit posing — what he called "muscle display" — alongside genuine, if carefully chosen, lifts. He understood that the audience had come as much to look as to be amazed. His tours of the United States, the British colonies, India, Australia, and South Africa between 1893 and 1905 reached audiences that no previous strongman had attempted.

"He stood, and you could see every muscle. He moved, and you forgot they were there."

Notable feats

Sandow's lifting record is harder to reconstruct than his fame would suggest. Many of his programmed feats — supporting a horse on a plank, harnessed-team pulls, "human bridge" platform stunts — were spectacles rather than measurable lifts, and the loaded weights varied between venues. The figures most consistently reported in his prime are a bent press in the region of 269 lb (122 kg), a one-arm "shoulder-and-bent-press" close to 250 lb (113 kg) using a thick-handled dumbbell, and a two-arm clean-and-jerk in the 250–270 lb range. These do not approach what Saxon and Cyr would later put up; Sandow's distinction was never to be the strongest pound-for-pound, but to be the most exhibited.

His most lasting performance was off-stage: on 14 September 1901 he organised what is generally considered the first major bodybuilding contest, "The Great Competition," at the Royal Albert Hall, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the judges. The winner received a bronze statuette of Sandow himself. Almost a century later, in 1977, the same statuette was adopted as the Mr. Olympia trophy.

Method

Sandow's training, as he set it down in Strength and How to Obtain It (1897) and Body-Building, or Man in the Making (1904), was based on light dumbbell work performed with extreme attention. He emphasised slow, controlled repetitions in front of a mirror, with strict isolation of each muscle. He sold a graduated set of "Sandow's Combined Developer" — small spring-and-dumbbell appliances — by mail order, accompanied by a printed course. The system has dated badly as serious strength training. Its importance is that it was the first widely taken up by the general public: by 1900 it had reached schools, regiments, and households across the English-speaking world.

Legacy

In 1898 Sandow founded Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture in London, the first periodical devoted to the subject. He went on to open the first of several Sandow's Schools of Physical Culture, write or co-write a small library of instructional books, and serve as the British Army's Inspector of Physical Culture during the First World War. King George V appointed him Special Instructor in Physical Culture to the royal household in 1911. By the time of his death in 1925 the word "physical culture" was effectively his.

His bronze statuette has outlived everything else. The original was sculpted by Frederick Pomeroy in 1901 and cast in three sizes; the smallest, in modified form, became the Mr. Olympia trophy when Joe Weider revived the contest in the bodybuilding boom of the late 1970s. A century after Sandow's death his body remains, in the most literal sense, the model.

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. The cause of his death has also become folklore: for many years the story was repeated that he died of a stroke after lifting a car single-handed from a ditch. David Chapman's biography found no contemporary basis for the story, which appears to derive from his widow's later recollections; the death certificate gives the cause as a cerebral haemorrhage, with no reference to a lifting incident. The car story persists because it is good copy, not because it is documented.

His nationality is also commonly muddled. He was Prussian by birth, naturalised British in 1906, and is sometimes described as German because Prussia became part of the German Empire in 1871; he is not in any meaningful sense a "German strongman" in the way that Saxon or Hackenschmidt were of their respective traditions.