Paul Anderson’s Moscow Triumph – Iron Game History – October, 1995

June 15, 1955 was a rather cold, wet day in Moscow. Fifteen thousand spectators wrapped up in raincoats and sheltering beneath umbrellas or newspapers waited patiently for the start of a weightlifting match in the open-air Zelyony Theater. The coming encounter between the weightlifters of the USA and the USSR had been on the lips of people in trams and shops, in restaurants and movie houses. By evening the streets of the city became deserted. The unfortunate ones without tickets had flown off like moths to the light of their television screens. Upsetting all the normal notions about the size of its following weightlifting took its revenge on soccer and ice-hockey. To be honest, if the match itself had not taken place and only one man had remained on the platform, thousands of spectators would have still stayed in their seats, if that man had been Paul Anderson.