Game of Thrones star ‘Thor’ Björnsson aims to lift 510kg this weekend but has cast gentle giant Eddie Hall as his nemesis
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here are probably sound structural reasons why the Eddie Hall deadlift world record video from July 2016 is so hard to stop watching, why it has become a sleeper internet phenomenon, a thing people go back to, theorise about, commune over in ways that seem both lighthearted and also deeply-felt in the way of all the best sport.
Part of this is its stark and simple theatre. The video is 55 seconds long. It features what seems at first to be an abandoned American-style fridge‑freezer, but turns out on closer inspection to be a single very square man, essentially a seamless slab of human muscle, quivering slightly, moaning to himself, profoundly alone even in front of a boisterous full-house crowd.
Hall bends down and straps his fingers to a bar loaded with vast weights wrapped for the occasion in shiny red plastic like a row of Dutch cheeses. He crouches, then lifts, the bar twanging and bending with extraordinary violence, torque surging through his body, skull throbbing, blood starting to drip from his nose and ears, the power of a one-litre petrol car coursing through each of his Iberian ham thighs.
