Last year we shared with you the story of Naomi Kutin, a then 88-pound 9-year old from Fairlawn, New Jersey, who became an Internet sensation when a video surfaced or her squatting 187-pounds. Unlike a lot of other flash in the pan viral favorites (Jeremy Lin, I’m looking in your direction), Naomi wasn’t satisfied being “that kid from the weightlifting video”. She wanted to be the only kid from the weightlifting video.

On Sunday, Kutin used her proportional strength of a spider to break the world record for raw squatting when she lifted 215 pounds, more than twice her body weight. To put it another way, holy sh*t, she just squatted ME.

The previous record for the 97 pound division was 209 pounds broken by a 44 year old European woman last summer. Kutin actually regained her own record after losing it several months ago.

Kutin drew a round of applause from the onlookers as she completed the record-breaking lift.

“When I was younger, my friends would be doing a lot of things that I couldn’t do, and I wanted to do something extraordinary,” an excited Kutin said. “I wanted to break a record of some sort and I just really wanted to get this record.” (via KIII TV)

Congratulations to Naomi for pulling a Billy Mitchell, and for putting those European 40-year olds in their place. This is certainly a more athletic use of the KIDS WHO COULD KICK MY ASS tag than usual, as we usually hand it out for pre-teens Zangiefing bullies and adults who have turned their children into monsters.

Read the rest of this entry »

From CNN, to catch you up.

At least 76 people died in Norway in a terror attack July 22 that started with a bomb blast in the capital Oslo and continued with an hour-long gun rampage at a camp for Labour Party teens and young adults on nearby Utoya Island.

Of course, that didn’t stop New Zealander Cameron Leslie from gunning his lats. Cameron was at an gymnasium and was an eye witness to the initial attack, a car bomb that exploded between government buildings in Regjeringskvartalet, the executive government quarter of Oslo. He was interviewed about his experience on a New Zealand television station, and if you think he’s got a compelling story or a poignant point of view about the shattered lives and blood-soaked faces that immediately surrounded him … you might be putting too much faith in humanity.

The choice excerpts were transcribed by our friends at Off The Bench, and I ask you enjoy them, but Jesus Christ.

“Secondly, also for the fact that when the blast went off I was on the eighth repetition of a 165-KG bench press, uh, you know, that’s quite a lot of weight.

“You know we had ceiling and stuff come down around us, we had a lot of confused looking faces, and shortly after we heard an announcement over the speaker phone to evacuate the area as quickly as possible, people started leaving, uh, naturally I finished my sets and then quickly made my way to the second level.”

Naturally. He then added “I asked the guy to my right to spot me, but he couldn’t, because he no longer had arms”. Imagine how mad you’d be if a week after 9/11, some guy showed up on Wake Up Wisconsin talking about how he was doing chin-ups on the roof of the World Trade Center when the plane hit, and he thought “heh, whoa, that’s weird” and finished up, did a little yoga and calmly waltzed down the stairs. If only his collar had been popped, we might’ve been witness to the douchiest f**king guy in cultural history.

People lift weights all the time, but THERE’S A LIMIT, FOOL. You just can’t go around lifting barbells that weight more than you do and then screaming like an idiot, because when that happens your sweet little brain [which hardly functions optimally as it is] gets deprived of oxygen, and then this happens. And I hope that, in the event that I pass out into a rack of dumbbells on camera, that the guy holding the camera isn’t a dumbbell, too. –Total Pro Sports.

About 75 of you have sent me this story about the Chilean Olympic weightlifter who didn’t realize she was preggers until she gave birth in the middle of a training session to a preemie. Elizabeth Poblete, who’s actually a 22-year-old Brazilian, gave the world a new innovation to the “snatch” event when she gave birth to a 2.5-pound baby boy last week.

“A week [before the birth], I acted as a judge in a competition in Chile and this girl was competing. All went well and she won the competition,” the AFP news agency reportedly quoted him as saying.

“I could see she was a big girl, round and strong. That’s all I noticed.” –NY Daily News, via everyone.

The baby boy is in ICU in a Sao Paulo hospital, and there’s no indication that anyone knows who the father is. I can’t imagine that there was a line around the block for a woman as big, round and strong as that. Although I wouldn’t mind to have a woman grab me and hoist me over her head right before achievement. Just once.

College Humor found video of this dude attempting to make America laugh again by lifting a barbell while standing on top of one of those big colorful workout balls. And I don’t get why that guy has his buddy bringing a video camera into the gym. And maybe instead of trying to climb onto a ball, try throwing some more weight on that bar and doing more than three freaking reps. HAVE YOU NO SHAME, SIR? I’d rather do steroids than work out with this guy…

Steroid testing paranoia has reached a fever pitch in Belgium, where the mere sight of doping officials at a bodybuilding meet caused competitors to flee and eventually forced the event to be cancelled. Thanks to OC for the heads-up. From the monolith:

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

“I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again,” doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

During testing of bodybuilding events last year, doping authorities of northern Belgium’s Flanders region found that three-quarters of the competitors tested positive.

This begs another question: if everyone’s using, and everyone’s testing, why not just go clean? Forget about the merits of “not cheating” or whatever those prissy traditionalists are calling it now. If you didn’t use steroids, your competition has just been quartered. That’s a lot of logic for those Belgians, though. Though it doesn’t explain why anyone would pass on that delicious Belgian chocolate. Mmmm, chocolate.