Yury Vlasov

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Olympic medal record
Men's weightlifting
Gold	1960 Rome	Heavyweight
Silver	1964 Tokyo	Heavyweight

Yury Petrovich Vlasov (Also commonly spelled Yuri, Russian: Юрий Петрович Власов; born December 5, 1935 in Makiivka, Ukraine) is a former Olympic heavyweight weightlifter for the Soviet Union, a writer and a politician.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Weightlifting achievements 3 Career after retiring from weightlifting 4 References

[edit] Biography

Yury was born to the family of a military journalist and Komintern agent in China Pyotr Vlasov. Later his father worked as the General Consul in Shanghai, then the Ambassador to Burma.

Yury studied at the Saratov Suvorov military school (1946-1953), then at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy in Moscow, from which graduated with a Gold Medal in 1959. In Academy he became interested in weightlifting, joined Armed Forces sports society and soon became Master of Sport of the USSR (1957). Between 1959 and 1963 he won all the competitions he participated in, with a huge success at the Rome 1960 Summer Olympics where he beat the world records three times, becoming the first man to snatch more than 200kg (202.5). He was proclaimed the best sportsmen of the 1960 Olympics and the "Strongest Man on the Planet" [1], [2]. He was considered a nerdish intellectual in rim glasses [3], going against the stereotypes attached to weightlifting.

At the 1964 Summer Olympics he finished second, after another Soviet weightlifter, Leonid Zhabotinsky, and retired from the Olympic Team.

[edit] Weightlifting achievements

• Olympic Champion (1960)
• Silver Medalist in Olympic Games (1964)
• Four-time Senior World Champion (1959, 1961-1963)
• Silver Medalist in Senior World Championships (1964)
• Six-time Consecutive Senior European Champion (1959 - 1964)
• Set thirty four world records during career

[edit] Career after retiring from weightlifting

After retiring from weightlifting he became a writer and a politician. Due to his damaged spine he for a few years could not walk and moved in a wheelchair.

He is the author of several books Overcoming yourself, Salty Joys, The Special Region of China (about his father), Flaming Cross, Rus' without a leader, etc.

Between 1968 and 1976, he published his works in the Soviet Union. But after his work (Flaming Cross) was published in the West, he was consider a mild dissident and was not published in the Soviet Union.

In 1987, after Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, Vlasov became chairman of the Federation of Athletic Gymnastics of the USSR.

He was elected to the Congress of Soviets for the Lyublyansky district of Moscow in 1989 and broke from the Communist Party. In parliament he started as a member of the liberal Inter-regional Deputies Group, along with Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Sobchak and Boris Yeltsin, but later became close to nationalists and Christian Democrats. His views were described by some journalists^{[citation needed]} as chauvinistic and anti-Semitic.

In 1993, he was elected to the State Duma of the Russian Federation. He was a candidate in the 1996 Russian presidential election but only received 0.02% of the vote (the second-to-last result amongst the ten participants). Following this he apparently retired from politics.

In 2004, at age 69, he took part in veteran's competitions and was able to snatch 185 kg [4].

[edit] References

• Yury Vlasov - Hall of Fame at Weightlifting Exchange
• Biography (Russian)
• Yury Vlasov The Fairness of the Strength - the book of memoirs (Russian)
• Vlasov's biography and photos (Russian)
• Is this possible? – article on post-Soviet antisemitism, including quotes by Vlasov (Russian)

Persondata
NAME	Vlasov, Yury
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Vlasov, Yury Perovitch; Vlasov, Yuri; Власов, Юрий Петрович (Russian)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Soviet Olympic weightlifter, writer and politician
DATE OF BIRTH	December 5, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH	Makiivka, Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH