Yury Vlasov

Olympic medal record
Men's weightlifting
Competitor for  Soviet Union
Olympic Games
	1960 Rome	+90 kg
	1964 Tokyo	+90 kg
World Weightlifting Championships
	1959 Warsaw	+90 kg
	1961 Vienna	+90 kg
	1962 Budapest	+90 kg
	1963 Stockholm	+90 kg
	1964 Tokyo	+90 kg
European Weightlifting Championships
	1959 Warsaw	+90 kg
	1960 Milan	+90 kg
	1961 Vienna	+90 kg
	1962 Budapest	+90 kg
	1963 Stockholm	+90 kg
	1964 Moskva	+90 kg
USSR Weightlifting Championships
	1958 Stalino	+90 kg
	1959 Moscow	+90 kg
	1960 Leningrad	+90 kg
	1961 Dnepropetrovsk	+110 kg
	1962 Tbilisi	+110 kg
	1963 Moscow	+102.5 kg
Summer Spartakiad of the USSR
	1959 Moscow	+90 kg
	1963 Moscow	+102.5 kg

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

Biography

Yury was born in Makeyevka, Ukrainian SSR 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 he 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 clean and jerk more than 200 kg (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.

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.

Career after retiring from weightlifting

After retiring from weightlifting he became a writer and a politician. Due to his damaged spine, for a few years he 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 considered a mild dissident and was not published in the Soviet Union.

In 1987, after Mikhail 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 People's Deputies 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.

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 0.20% 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 lift 185 kg.^[4]

References

External links

• 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)