Europe's Strongest Man (IFSA)

International Federation of Strength Athletes

Type	Sports federation
Headquarters	Glasgow, Scotland
Official language	English
Managing Director	Christian Fennell

IFSA Strongman World Championships

2007
Tournament information
Location	Various international locations
Established	2005
Final year	2007
Format	Multi-event competition
Purse	varies
Final champion
Vasyl Virastyuk

The International Federation of Strength Athletes (IFSA or IFSA Strongman) was an international governing body for strongman competition. IFSA operated from 1995-2007 and was based in Glasgow, Scotland.

In 1995, David Webster, a Scotsman who later received an OBE for his services to sport and head coordinator of the World's Strongest Man from its inception, and his colleague Dr Douglas Edmunds, seven-times Scottish shot and discus champion and twice world caber champion, along with representatives from the competitors in strength athletics including Jamie Reeves, Ilkka Kinnunen and Marcel Mostert formed a governing body called the International Federation of Strength Athletes ("IFSA"). IFSA ran its own grand prix events from 1995-2001 in cooperation with WSM. IFSA began co-producing the Strongman Super Series events from 2001-2004, still in cooperation with WSM. IFSA entered an agreement with World Class Events (WCE), headed by Ulf Bengtsson, to run the Strongman Super Series. The Strongman Super Series was designed to award the annual Strongman World Championship title, but also acted as a qualifying vehicle for the World's Strongest Man contest.

For almost a decade IFSA and WSM worked in full cooperation, but this changed at the end of the 2004 season when IFSA returned to organizing its own grand prix events and World Strongman Championships from 2005-2007. The InvestGroup Ventures' sports rights management arm, InvestGroup Sports Management, invested heavily into IFSA and this led to the creation of IFSA Strongman. The strategy was to acquire most of the international assets and properties relating to the strongman sport. In essence this was a new organization with some, such as Magnus Samuelsson describing it as "a new company...with the same name as our old federation". The attempt at dominance was not well received by TWI/WSM and disagreement ensued leading to a split in the sport. When IFSA and WSM split in 2004, the Strongman Super Series sided with TWI/WSM forming a rival federation to the IFSA. With the WSM being a TWI owned event, IFSA Holdings announced its own World Strongman Championships for 2005, to be held in Quebec, and thus from that point had no involvement in the WSM contest. From this point, IFSA continued to organize the annual IFSA World Strongman Championships and a series of Grand Prix events throughout the year. Between 2005 and 2007 IFSA had their own version of other major events such as a rival IFSA version of Europe's Strongest Man, known as Europe's Strongest Man (IFSA).