Competitors at the world amateur Strongman championships held recently in Columbus, Ohio, which included Montauk’s Cristian Candemir in the lightweight (under 175 pounds) division, were apprised in advance of most but not all of the “strange implements” they’d be required to lift and load in a timed face-off.
“Every competition is different, though you know most of what’s coming,” the 28-year-old East Hampton Starbucks barista said at The Star Saturday. “In a Strongman gym you’ll see things like concrete stones, sandbags, kegs, logs with handles. . . . There were six objects we had 60 seconds in all to lift and load in Columbus, beginning with a 200-pound block, and then on to a 250-pound sandbag, a 287-pound Basque cube, a 300-pound sandbag, a 265-pound fire hydrant that you had to lift onto a 48-inch-high platform, and a 300-pound tombstone-esque replica of the 410-pound Husafell stone in Iceland. . . .”
The fire hydrant took his fellow contestants by surprise, though, luckily, he said, not him.
“Matt Galcik, a friend of mine in Montauk, who has been a tremendous help, had a friend who worked in the public sector in New York City who had a circa-1898 fire hydrant in her front yard. I used to lift it when I was training in the weeks that led up to the world championships. I’d wake up at 4, take the 5:15 Jitney to the city and two trains to Williamsburg, where the Squats and Science gym is, train there from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, commute back to the Empire State Building, where I had a temporary position at the Starbucks there, and then go back to Montauk. I did this every day for six weeks. I pushed myself to the limit, so that I’d be absolutely ready, and it paid off handsomely for me.”
It was the fire hydrant that had put him over the top, Candemir agreed. “It was serendipitous, that’s the only way to describe it. All the other guys struggled with it. I popped it up just like that. . . . I angled it with one hand on the top, lifted the bottom end, stood up, and lapped it. Then I adjusted my hand placement, brought it up to my chest, and hip-thrusted it up onto the platform.”
He then lifted and loaded the 287-pound Basque cube with ease, and was on to the 300-pound sandbag, which felt like it was “almost alive,” when his 60 seconds ran out. Which was too bad, he said with a smile, “because I wanted to lift the Husafell stone so badly.”
At any rate, he was “very pleased with [his] performance.” He hadn’t dreamed of finishing as high as fifth in a field of 22. All he wanted going in was “merely to be there.”
As a result of his success, “I have a different plan now,” said the personable interviewee. “I want to move up a class and engage in international competition.”
“I hope to rekindle my passion for the sport and to combine that with travel, which is another passion of mine,” he said before taking his leave on an electric scooter.