Paul Anderson’s June 12 1957 Backlift – Iron Game History – June, 2001

Why would any man crawl under a platform loaded with weights weighing almost three tons more than himself, then try to backlift it? Paul Anderson says he was motivated to try it to prove he was the strongest man in the world after someone had shown him a copy of the 1956 Guinness Book of Superlatives which listed Louis Cyr as the strongest man in the world: “The greatest weight ever raised by a human being is 4,133 lbs (1.84 tons) by the 350 lb. French-Canadian, Louis Cyr (1863-1912) in Chicago in 1896 in a back-lift (weight raised off trestles).” Paul wrote in his autobiography, A Greater Strength: “I decided to break Cyr’s record in my hometown, partly because of the prohibitive cost involved in moving all that weight to another area.”