Among Queenstown’s unsung sports heroes is a world record-holding powerlifter who flew off this week to his fifth world champs. At last year’s champs he set a squat world record and also the deadlift one, but that latter record was broken by another competitor about five minutes later. He then broke his own squat record at a competition in London in February, lifting 288.5kg, and reclaimed the deadlift record which this time he held for about a month. He’s been nominated or seeded third — ‘‘one of the people I’m up against is the top-ranked powerlifter of all time’’. Since taking up the sport he’s trained six days a week — currently in his garage — and between one and two and a-half hours each session.
