Weightlifting: Last hurrah for Games legend

By CHRIS RATTUE

He's the smallest man in the building but he draws the biggest crowd.

Naim Suleymanoglu walks into the makeshift Olympics weightlifting training venue, at an old ammunition storage shed at Regents Park, and heads for a massage.

When he emerges from behind a curtain, loitering journalists, photographers and camera crews gather from all points and follow him down the walkway separating rows of heaving lifters.

Over the next hour and a half, as the tiny Turkish lifter hurls extraordinary weights skywards, other competitors large and small turn their eyes towards him.

It is a compelling sight - a man barely five foot tall (152cm) who can lift weights nearly three times his bodyweight. "Pocket Hercules" as he is called.

Just as compelling are his records and his life story, particularly his defection from Bulgaria when he sneaked away from his team mates at a Melbourne restaurant 14 years ago.

The records speak for themselves. In Sydney he will attempt to win his fourth Olympic gold medal in the 62kg class.

Had his former country, Bulgaria, not boycotted the Los Angeles Games in 1984, his record would be even more enduring. Suleymanoglu himself considers he is now going for his fifth gold.

He has set dozens of world records, and from 1983, until retiring after Atlanta, had lost just once in international competitions.

And you can throw in seven world titles and six European championships for good measure.

Last year an international panel of journalists named him one of the world's 25 greatest athletes.

He is widely regarded as the greatest lifter ever. It was the IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch who rang Suleymanoglu at his home in the Turkish capital, Ankara, to help persuade him to compete here, at the age of 33.

The Turk's life story is just as remarkable.

Suleymanoglu was born in a Bulgarian mountain village heavily populated with Turk descendants, just 160km from the Turkish border.

But in the early 1980s, the Communist Government tried to assimilate Turks into the Slavic culture. For the weightlifter, this meant his returning from representing Bulgaria in Melbourne in 1985 to find that authorities wanted to change his name.



For a year he hid his intentions of defecting until his next visit to Melbourne, when he escaped from minders by sneaking through the back door of a Chinese restaurant.

He was hidden for days by local Turks, took refuge in their embassy, and then went to London where he was flown to Turkey in the Prime Minister's private jet.

Later, the Turkish Government paid Bulgaria $US1 million to gain the citizenship Suleymanoglu needed to compete at the 1988 Olympics. His family was able to join him even before the fall of Communism.

The little man is now Turkey's greatest sporting hero, although of course football is the dominant sport.

At the halfway point in his training sessions, Suleymanoglu saunters to a small outside enclosure where he puffs on a cigarette through a long holder.

Some reports claim he smokes 50 a day. His smoking companion, Turkish weightlifting president Savas Agaoala, who is a doctor, insists it is more like 15.

"For my inner peace," is how Suleymanoglu explains his habit.

His inner peace could be disturbed in Sydney, where for the first time he is not an unbeatable favourite.

He has been back in training for only six months, and was third at this year's European championship.

There is also word that Croatian Nikolay Pechalov, who stands a giant 155cm, has pipped Suleymanoglu's best snatch weight in training.

But the Turk's confidence is not dented.

"I believe I can win the gold in Sydney more easily than in Atlanta. Silver or bronze is nothing for me. I am only satisfied with gold," he has said.

Suleymanoglu was greeted by a band of enthusiastic Turks when he arrived separately from his team mates at Sydney Airport. After the Olympics, he intends returning to Sydney to see friends he made in the Turkish community.

After retiring again, he will stand for election to the international weightlifting federation.

And he has promised his brother, who loads the weights in training, that he will give up smoking when his Olympic event is over.

Naim Suleymanoglu goes for gold on Sunday.