Yury Vlasov

Yury Vlasov

Yury Vlasov at the 1960 Olympics
Personal information
Born	5 December 1935 (1935-12-05) (age 81) Makiivka, Ukrainian SSR, URSS
Height	1.85 m (6 ft 1 in)
Weight	125–136 kg (276–300 lb)
Sport
Sport	Weightlifting
Coached by	Suren Bogdasarov
Medal record Representing  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 Moscow +90 kg

Yury Petrovich Vlasov (Russian: Юрий Петрович Власов; born 5 December 1935) is a Soviet writer and retired heavyweight weightlifter and politician. He competed at the 1960 and 1964 Olympics and won a gold medal in 1960 and a silver in 1964; at both games he was the Olympic flag bearer for the Soviet Union. During his career Vlasov won four world titles and set 31 ratified world records. He retired in 1968 and became a prominent writer and later a politician. He was a member of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union (1989) and then of the Russian State Duma (1993) and took part in the 1996 Russian presidential election.

Yury was born in Makeyevka, Ukrainian SSR, to the family of Pyotr Vlasov (1905–1953), a military journalist and Komintern agent. His father worked as the General Consul in Shanghai and 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 honors in 1959. In 1956, while studying at the Academy he became interested in weightlifting, joined the Armed Forces sports society and soon became Master of Sport of the USSR (1957). He was noticed in 1958 when he finished third at the Soviet Union championships. Between 1959 and 1963 he won all the competitions he participated in, with a major success at the Rome 1960 Summer Olympics where he set three world records and became 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". He was considered a nerdish intellectual in rim glasses, going against the stereotypes attached to weightlifting.