Totally agree with the level of athletes right now. The sport is growing in popularity but lets be honest it is still a very small niche sport. WSM is still ultimately a TV show that happens to be about a strongman comp. The format with the heats and stone offs, fit nicely with showing it over multiple nights and then leading into a final. The money that WSM get from the TV deals to have exclusive rights to show the footage is worth so much money there is no way it will change to live or stream type footage anytime soon. Until the sport can attract major sponsors with big money I cant see any thing changing.
Its funny when you hang out here or have friends who are interested in strength sports, you tend to get a distorted view of the popularity of these types of events. I don’t know anyone in my normal life you has even the slightest interest in strongman and when the say worlds strongest man or Arnold classic they have no idea what you are talking about and still don’t understand it when you explain it.
Agreed here. I don’t know what height they were loading to, but I saw Treys last stone load, and it looked pretty high for him. And trey is an inch or 2 taller than novikov. So I’m not shocked he missed the last one, a few athletes did. He could have also had a drop on one of the first 4, that could explain his slow time through 4.
Looks like this year they also had to run the stones in a bit like they did back in the old days. This would have made it more challenging for some athletes also.
No idea if it was just post comp blues/adrenaline/adrenaline dump, but in his YT channel video, you can hear (barely) Martins talking to some dude and saying he’s going to really gun for WSM next year, possibly skipping the Arnold.
Before his WSM prep started, Martins mentioned that the turnaround time from the Arnold to WSM was sub optimal, and that his prep routine would necessarily be adjusted. Fwiw.
Also, Loz did mention in his results video that he heard Martins had tacky issues in the stones event.
add: Again fwiw, Tom S skipped Europe’s strongest man, gave a half hearted effort at the Arnold, so maybe there are just too many events, too close together; to win WSM, the other events have to be “sacrificed”?
I think if you look historically, very few athletes are able to win back to back to back contests. Big Loz said it in his video yesterday, everyone loses. Martins has one three big comps, but this time round the events suited Tom better and maybe he was coming in fresher. WSM is just one of many shows, and all it really shows is who was the best at this contest. I think I hear that maybe Tom was going to take a year out, so maybe he wont compete next year or maybe he will only so worlds ? Either way the level of good athletes in the sport right now is incredible so the next 12 months of competitions are going to be interesting.
It’s the show that leads to the most non-Strongman opportunities, which is why the WSM is the one the athletes most want to win (though the Arnold is considered the event won by the actual strongest strongman strength wise).
Martins was on a TV game show, a talk show, plus I’ve seen him in 2 (or 3?) TV commercials due to the fact that he won WSM 2019. Plus his personality helped of course. If he wins another one, I’m guessing the commercial opportunities will increase significantly.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with the final results though… Martins could have won the stones, and he still would have come in second overall. Tom won by a large margin. He was just better than Martins on almost every single event.
I’m happy to have predicted the podium accurately, but I really underestimated how good Tom is right now. There were a few events, like the flintstone press and the deadlift, that I thought Tom might lose a few points on, and he blew those events away. He was so damn good this weekend. He’s going to be hard to beat for awhile.
Oh, I agree TS was the clear winner. I only mentioned Martins having tacky issues because he finished middle of the pack in stones, which was a shocker.
This is a great question. I would say, mostly because of the events. Those events were SO different from what we saw at wsm. The only two types of events that carried over from the Arnold to the wsm we’re the log press and the timber carry, in any capacity. Natural stone to shoulder is a COMPLETELY different animal from traditional atlas stone medleys. Circus db is the most technique driven ohp. And the squat just isn’t seen much in strongman anymore. It was just a show that didn’t suit his strengths. Whereas guys like novikov and licis have the ability to podium in any given show, Tom just isn’t there yet. The events at wsm this year very much seemed that they were determined with his participation in mind. Particularly the last day.
I’ll correct myself slightly here, it appears the problem was that the weights used were tall, so the ‘shorter’ guys basically had to shrug/upright row them to get high enough to put on the steps.
Ive done power stairs once in my life in a big show, and my height was a huge advantage. I was about 3 inches taller than the next tallest competitor. It absolutely mattered.
