Paul Anderson - Toccoa, GA
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Lat34North
N 34° 34.849 W 083° 19.131
17S E 287306 N 3829002
This statue of Paul Anderson is located in the Paul Anderson Memorial Park at the intersection of Big A Road (GA 17) and E Tugalo Street, Toccoa, GA.
Waymark Code: WM992A
Location: Georgia, United States
Date Posted: 07/16/2010
Views: 2
Paul Edward Anderson
Won an Olympic and World Championship gold medals in weight lifting.
"Paul Edward Anderson (October 17, 1932 - August 15, 1994) was a weightlifter, strongman, and professional powerlifter.
In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, Anderson, as winner of the USA National Amateur Athletic Union Weightlifting Championship, traveled to the Soviet Union, where weightlifting was a popular sport, for an international weightlifting competition. In a newsreel of the event shown in the United States the narrator, Bud Palmer, commented as follows: "Then, up to the bar stepped a great ball of a man, Paul Anderson." And paraphrasing Palmer "The Russians snickered as Anderson gripped the bar which was set at 402.5 pounds, an unheard of lift. But their snickers quickly changed to awe and all out cheers as up went the bar and Anderson lifted the heaviest weight overhead of any human in history." Prior to Anderson's lift, the Russian champion, Medvedev, had matched the Olympic record of the time with a 330.5 pound press. Anderson then did a 402.5 pound press. During the 1955 World Championships in Munich, Germany that October, Anderson also broke two other world records (for the press - 407.7 pounds - and total weight cleared - 1129.5 pounds) as he easily won the competition in his weight class to become world champion. Upon his return to the USA, he was received by then vice-president Richard Nixon, who thanked him for being such a wonderful goodwill ambassador.
In 1956 he won a gold medal in a long, tough duel in the Melbourne, Australia Olympic Games as a weightlifter in the super-heavyweight class (while suffering from a 104 degree fever). Paul was tied with Argentine Humberto Selvetti in the amount of weight lifted, but because Anderson weighing 137.9 kilograms, was lighter than Selvetti, who weighed 143.5 kilograms, Anderson was awarded the medal.
Anderson turned professional after the 1956 Summer Olympics at a fairly early age and many of his feats of strength, while generally credible, were not done under rigorous enough conditions to be 'official'. Nevertheless, he was at one time listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for a backlift of 6270 pounds."
Wikipedia
Paul Edward Anderson