6/10/2023 0 Comments Victory Cigarettes Bulgaria![]() His defection to Turkey, at 19, had meant losing his family once more, and his girlfriend as well. He had left his family at 10 and gone away to a sports school to develop his enormous talent. By hoisting it over his head, all the distance and time between him and her would disappear. Sometimes, Suleymanoglu says, he imagined the bar as a lover from whom he had long been separated. Now began the trial that would make Naim Suleymanoglu pace and grit his teeth for the next four years: How could history's greatest weightlifter lay the weight down? In the villages they began choosing the lambs they would slay in his name. In the cities of Turkey, men flooded the streets and cried. The second explosion drove it over his head. The first explosion of power in his hips and thighs sent the weight up to his shoulders. His mouth opened as if to scream No! at what his body was about to do, but no sound came forth. His feet rocked, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe. His eyes closed as he squatted over the bar. ![]() A nation leaned toward its televisions and fell silent, to observe the matter of fact. And yet on this day in 1988 life in Turkey, the country to which he had defected two years earlier, stopped.
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