Weightlifting competitions are a bizarre slice of the human story. They’re like athletic achievement on an atomic level, an activity so specialized that they are mostly spectated only by those who also join in the activity, as opposed to the extremely low percentage of football fans who actually play football who watch football every weekend. The surreal quality of power lifting was on full display at the USA Power Lifting Raw National Championships, when Ray Williams did a 1005-lb squat.
That’s … *checks calculator* a lot of weight.
Ray already holds the official world record for a raw squat lift without knee wraps at 968 pounds, according to Wikipedia, and the comments under this video suggests that’s the kind of lift performed in the video (I guess those neoprene sleeves don’t count as official wraps?). The above lift beat that by nearly 40 pounds, setting a new American record in the process. Apparently, it doesn’t count as a new official world record because it didn’t happen in an international event, but that’s not fair. The man lifted 1005 pounds, and if no human has ever done that before under those conditions, then that’s a world record. We here at UPROXX will be honoring it as such henceforth.
Special shoutout to the NSFW-language commentary for going from 0 to 100 percent hyped over Big Ray’s big lift. “Eat, big fella” indeed.
