You ask yourself does he have the stones? The answer is yes, I do.
1951 (Age 2): Fjord stuns parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins at the annual family reunion when he lifts an empty keg (the Rasmussen family gatherings got a little wild) over his head. “With grip strength like that,” his uncle Hans murmurs, “the sky’s the limit.”
1958 (Age 7): Fjord begins strength training in the backyard with his uncle Hans and his father, Lars, a stonemason. After school every day, he picks up and carries car axles, granite globes the size of basketballs, and cinder blocks (with fingertips only) across the length of the yard. By the time he is eight, there are bald and sunken paths worn into the otherwise pristine lawn, and he is consuming two whole chickens and a loaf of bread a day.
1964 (Age 13): Fjord, unlike the generations of Rasmussen men before him—all of whom are six feet or taller—appears to have topped out at five feet eight inches. Uncle Hans privately wonders if the training might have stunted Fjord’s growth. Fjord—now weighing close to two hundred pounds (to maintain his son’s high-protein, four-thousand-calorie-a-day diet, his father now does extra jobs in the evenings, after he’s through training with Fjord)—resembles one of the granite balls he once toted across the lawn as a seven-year-old. Except with a blond Viking fro.
1971 (Age 22) Fjord enters his first World’s Strongest Man competition, the third annual installment in what will someday become the mainstay of off-hour ESPN programming, sandwiched between curling and rowing during what TV executives call The Zombie Hours. Fjord breaks the world record for the forty-meter subcompact car carry (the competition, held that year in West Germany, uses VW Beetle frames and bodies), crossing the line at just over twenty seconds, but loses the overall competition by three points, due to his poor showing at the Atlas Balls on the Pedestals challenge. Alone in the quiet of the locker room afterwards, he curses his height, unable to determine whether the pedestals are too tall, or whether he is too short.
1976 (Age 27): Fjord marries his high school sweetheart. When the priest says “do you take this woman?” Fjord nods and lifts her over his head.
1982 (Age 33): Working three jobs–as a bouncer at night, a trainer during the mornings, a route driver for a beer distributor (carrying a keg in each hand up stairwells being his specialty)–Fjord and his wife are just able to make ends meet. When he holds his infant daughter in his hands, he wonders how something that seems to weigh nothing at all can be so heavy.
1987 (Age 38): The window for achieving the title of World’s Strongest Man rapidly closing, a decade and a half marred by injury and increasingly height-biased competitions behind him (the inclusion of the Tractor Tire Over The Wall Challenge in WSM ’85 nearly undoing him, a poorly mended sphincter tear to show for it), both Uncle Hans and his father deceased (he knows it is not from a breaking of the heart, but still), Fjord stares down his fellow competitors at the Eighteen-Wheeler Pull, the final leg of WSM ’87. Four points behind and on the wrong side of thirty, he knows—he knows—that it is now or never.
