Our portraits
The Lad from the Village of Gehakert
English summary of Tyazhelaya Atletika. Ezhegodnik 1985 (Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport, 1985), pp. 61–62: the text is paraphrased, not translated.
At the world and European championships in Moscow's Izmailovo Palace of Sport in October 1983, the Bulgarian flyweight Neno Terziyski and the Soviet lifter Oksen Mirzoyan had started brilliantly, both champions already. In the 60 kg class Yurik Sarkisyan, the 1982 world champion, faced a worthy rival: the 19-year-old Bulgarian Stefan Topurov, who at the junior European championships in San Marino had set world records in the jerk (173 kg) and the total (305 kg). Bulgarian juniors specialise and take heavy loads early, so one entered for the senior world championships is surely a proven fighter.
Sarkisyan opened the snatch with 130 kg, a weight he had never started with. After winning the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR in July he had said that his snatch had big reserves, and it showed: 130, 135 and 137.5 kg were all model lifts. Topurov made 132.5 kg and failed with 137.5 kg. Sarkisyan longed to attack the 138 kg world record the Pole M. Severin had just set. "Let me!" he whispered to Aleksandr Prilepin, head coach of the national team, and would surely have lifted 140 kg then. But the coach refused: with a 5 kg lead, and lighter than his rival, he had the gold in his pocket and should save his strength for the jerk.
Sarkisyan had never been weak in the jerk, but the road was hard. A Bulgarian journalist said Topurov could still overtake him; I did not believe it. Then the sturdy Bulgarian took 180 kg to the chest, barely rose, and jerked it, to the hall's cheers: never before had a man lifted three times his own bodyweight. Someone later wrote that Topurov, not Sarkisyan, was the hero of the day. I disagree. There were two heroes on the platform, but only one champion, and he was Sarkisyan, who won the total. His jerk was so shrewdly planned that with 175 kg, a world record, on his third attempt he forced Topurov to try 182.5 kg, which the Bulgarian coaches had not expected and which was beyond him. Sarkisyan took the total world record of 312.5 kg and the gold, and Ivan Abadzhiev, senior coach of the Bulgarians, congratulated Prilepin on a bright tactical victory.
A school teacher's pupil
Sarkisyan's technique is praised by every specialist, yet he began not in a specialised youth sports school but in a small school gym in Echmiadzin, travelling from his native Gehakert, and his coach was an untitled school teacher, Feliks Aliev, who also had to coach runners and volleyball players. Aliev especially loved weightlifting, having held first class at the Yerevan Institute of Physical Culture, and his boys loved it too, since strength is honoured in Armenian villages.
"My mother, Ayastan, and father, Otello, work on the collective farm," Yurik says. "I was so restless that nobody could keep track of me, so they asked the coach to take me and keep me busy under a grown man's eye. I liked lifting so much that I neglected school, and low marks followed. The coach and my parents banned me from training for a time, but I disobeyed: at midnight, when the village slept, I exercised quietly in the yard with bits of iron. I weighed 22 kg and at my first session I had cleaned a 20 kg bar!"
Some athletes leave a coach who gave them everything, and some outgrow a mentor who fears the strain of big sport. Sarkisyan was lucky: his coach put his soul into his pupil and was unafraid of superhuman tasks. Sarkisyan became USSR Master of Sport in 1977 at 16, International Master of Sport in 1979 and silver medallist of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. He is now a Merited Master of Sport, twice world champion (1982, 1983) and holder of 12 world records, plus two junior world and European golds (1979, 1981). Aliev became Honoured Coach of the USSR without demanding special conditions; he simply worked, a model for young specialists.
Aliev did not concentrate on his star alone. "Our villages have so many gifted boys," says Yurik. "Aliev never stops at success; he keeps looking for boys and teaches devotion to weightlifting. Six people from Gehakert have made the USSR Master of Sport standard with him in recent years, and there are talented lads: Valerik Samsonyan, Levon Bagdasaryan, Samvel Khachatryan."
Yurik's visits home are a festival for the villagers, above all the boys, who run to the Sarkisyan house from all around while he talks to them for hours. "My grandparents never knew the word 'barbell'. Now any boy knows my results and my rivals' by heart. You take a ten-year-old by the hand and it is like steel. Do you have to make them train? You have to hold them back!" Boys need real heroes, and Sarkisyan, who has gone to the platform for seven years with the USSR crest on his chest, is the idol of Gehakert.