Yury Vlasov

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. Yury was born in Makiivka, 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), th... more

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. Yury was born in Makiivka, 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... less