Snake America Ninety
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eBay: Longsleeve Champion grey shirt, size S, $14: Never seen this one before ... one of those thick oat-grey mottled T-shirts that Champion dined out on for 20 years, but long-sleeved. Wish this fit me but it's a 15" chest ... I think it's for child soldiers. I went through a period of my life where I bought this shirt, in short sleeves, every time I ran across it if it was on sale for under $50. I ended up getting maybe 20, at least a dozen. Every time I clean up around the house I find another. They're all in the top drawer of my Herman Miller armoire/thing. My girlfriend uses the other drawers for her clothes and never closes them, so it looks like a staircase to the clouds overflowing with garbage ... I was wondering if Herman Miller would be rolling in his grave at the sloth of it all so I looked him up. Turns out Herman Miller was the name of the father in law of the guy who bought the company. They bought it together -- a clerk who became company president, and his father in law Herman Miller, and renamed it after the father in law. It was called Star before that. Pretty good.
The shirt is 88% cotton and 12% rayon so it's springy, and the dimensions on it leave some questions. Like I said above, it's small, but it's also 28" long, and the height-to-width ratio puts it somewhere between a formal Turnbull & Asser nightshirt(1) or at and a french iupe. I mentioned in an earlier letter that Rick Owens, the furniture and homeless sneaker designer, used to go to hardcore shows and saw Black Flag in the early 1980s. When he lost his interest in juvenile music, sometime around the late 1980s, the scene turned towards Champion clothing, possibly because of his absence ... the dimensions here suit him. I bet if he had $20 he'd buy it. Recommended. Really good.
eBay: Pullover trefoil sweatshirt (?), made in Australia, $10: Adidas for a minute was the British Empire of clothing companies and was everywhere. How the math shook out that it made sense for them to produce this sweatshirt in Australia is beyond me. Adidas was based out of Germany and in the 70s their best sneakers were made in France. (All their sneakers are garbage and look the same.) They made shirts and shoes in the USA around then too -- Trefoil era, the trefoil is that little Adidas flower and a handy search word. Adidas also made sneakers in Australia on top of the tee here ... the trail runs cold as to why. Maybe it cost less to ship these to Hong Kong and Japan, etc., from Australia?
Maybe it's the exchange rate. Australia switched over from shillings/pence/what-have-you to actual money and the Australian Dollar in 1966. This shirt is newer than that. The Aus. Dollar was pegged to the U.S. Dollar in 1973 and floated a decade later, and went down in value. I can't tell if this sweatshirt was made in the 1970s or 80s, and whether the Aus. Dollar was down or up. Not that it mattered. Adidas pumped out these shirts for a decade with no update. Everything they made for 15 years looked exactly like this. Then the Berlin Wall fell and they got weird. It's why the same shirt gets worn in photos from the 70s, 80s and 90s. It was like a Hanes undershirt. I asked my friend Chris Hall, the sign re-seller, about Australia Adidas and he says that they made the shoes probably in the 1970s.
There's a psychedelic quality to vintage clothing, where if you look at the same object for decades it goes from garbage to awesome, and vice versa. I guess that goes for just about anything. I only ate Payday bars for like three years and now I can't look at them. Lots of Adidas clothing from that era had the same light blue. And for me those items of clothing weren't worn correctly 20 years ago. They reeked of an "at least this is old" stench, the kind a piece in the thrift store emanates and which pushes you into a bad purchase. It's less money than time, justification of an afternoon at a Salvation Army digging through garbage. Just because something is old does not mean it's good. This thing, too small for me, is awesome though. Something in the last few years changed my mind about trefoil Adidas. It brings to mind people on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain who smoked cigarettes, or teenagers in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Two things closer to Australia than this country. Recommended.
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Leg Day Observer 6:
Abadjiev at far left
Ivan Abadjiev, who coached the Bulgarian weightlifting team from 1968 to around 1990, died last Friday, March 24 from complications from surgery. Before he coached he won Bulgaria's first Olympic medal in the sport and after he coached he was elected to that country's parliament. You know you are a big dog when those kinds of accomplishments don't make your obit. He was the best coach in sports history, I think. He was a whatever coach well into his 30s, putting along ... then and now you worked your way up: kids, prospects (juniors) seniors -- kind of like in Texas where it was Pop Warner then high school then college, unless you were like, Barry Switzer. In his mid-30s, Abadjiev was on juniors. The seniors, competing at the Olympics and World Championships were trash. They couldn't win. This was the mid-late 1960s. The legend goes that he convinced the Bulgarian athletic administrators to let him take the reins and do his own thing ...
Bulgaria, 9 million people for most of the '70s and '80s, got like 200 medals over the past thirty years, second only to Communist Russia(2). That's insane. Bulgaria won a comparable amount under Abadjiev's first stint. Someone said on Instagram that Abadjiev produced 12 Olympic champions, 57 world champions and 64 European champions in his career. The story went that Abadjiev broke from old/Russian coaching methods to make his athletes repeat the lifts ad nauseum. Like, that's all they did ... you did the lifts (snatch and clean and jerk) in the morning and again at night. And you squatted and sometimes pulled (kind-of deadlifted) from the ground. You'd swim and get massages and did whirlpool. Russia and Abadjiev both selected athletes for training early. Motivated, usually poor kids would impress during grueling workouts and then would join the team and would get worked like mules. Abadjiev recruited super early, like 10-11, and by their mid-late teens, the kids were fluent in the lifts and could get under a bar faster than a camera shutter. They could work out for hours, even though some of them would become very obese. When the kids were strong enough, their workouts were shifted to daily training with heavy weights, up to a maximum. This was the break from Russia: Russian coaches broke up the lifts to their components: pulling the bar to your knees, from your knees to hips, the third pull (when you get under it, the turnover), different aspects of the jerk, snatch from block, snatch from stairs, no-feet snatch, and so on -- Russian athletes became strong and fluent in all the components of the lift and the best ones glued those together. Like learning to drive or fry an egg. The Russians did so many different exercises, at all sorts of weights, many many times, targeting all these different body parts. They became muscled up from all that time under tension, while some of the Bulgarians looked like house painters.
Abadjiev thought a bit different and the Bulgarian athletes felt it ... one line attributed to him was "You don't become a pianist by practicing the flute," and so his lifters practiced the snatch and clean and jerk over and over, all the time, at heavy weights. There was a distinct bias in Bulgaria against breaking the lifts up. And against lighter technique weights. So weights in the Russian 70% ranges(4) didn't count -- Bulgarians would lift that much on the way to adding weight on the bar until they found whatever their maximum was that day. They worked very near their daily or total maximum, lifting for singles or doubles (one or two reps, and a break) until they stopped for the afternoon. There would be cigarette breaks between the snatch and clean and jerk workouts. The maximum would eventually improve(5) and the athletes got used to throwing around very, very heavy weights. At that weight -- throwing a bar over twice your bodyweight in the air and immediately getting under it -- a lot of it is fear. Did the heavy training or the early specialization do a better job of killing fear? Or was it the money? I'm not sure if all the other countries trained Russian style back then, but a grip of them did. Abadjiev said bad shit about women and homosexuals that was not cool ... he was born in the 1930s but it nonetheless has to be mentioned.
Some of his lifters would load one side of the barbell with less weight and get a break. You would just be pushing yourself every day ... one of these workouts would destroy anyone reading this with very few exceptions? A 1984 Sports Illustrated article about Naim Suleymanoglu, a 4'11 Turk who's the best weightlifter to ever do it and who came up in the Bulgarian system, said that they would spend a day every 10 days only drinking fruit juice and barely eating, for the healing properties ... which is intermittent fasting but 25 years (minimum) before it popped off. They worked out six days a week, twice a day ... Sundays the team went to the beach in the summer.... Eight years later Suleymanoglu was in Turkey hanging out with Sports Illustrated's Gary Smith(6).
Long story short the Bulgarians in the 1980s were the best weightlifting team on the planet ... John Broz, the USAW coach from Vegas, told me that they'd have won all the weight classes in 1988 if they didn't get pinched midway through the games. 1987 they won five golds, two bronzes and a silver out of 10 weight classes. There is a cult of work around Abadjiev from weightlifters, and some powerlifters who subscribe to the Bulgarian method. The cult is going heavy every day. That's not exactly how they did it. I would define the Bulgarian method as dropping out of school and living in a hotel that has a gym with a platform in the lobby, and never leaving the hotel, never doing your laundry or running errands and getting to bed before 10 every night ... also having curly Seinfeld/Russian bully hair and wearing Adidas, maybe like the shirt above. They made a documentary about Abadjiev and the '87 team, called "School of Champions." It takes place over a year in a run-up to that World Championships they demolished.
It's such a good movie but the translation is such a bummer. It's just one of those things where the subject matter carries the lack of production value. It's impossible to watch because there are no subtitles and it's all in Bulgarian, but the English is an overdub of a guy translating as he's going along 10 seconds after the beat. It's such a bummer. I would love to see it with that audio stripped out. But there's a line at the end of the doc (actually the last scene) that I dig. This is the voiceover translator guy talking:
Lots of people ask me if they're cowards if they’re scared. Some say that I don’t get scared, that I’m not afraid. They lie. Everybody is scared … but the difference is that some, although they’re afraid, they go to dangers and overcome fear. Others give up. In this respect, I’m afraid too, but I think I can overcome it. We’ still go to European World Championships, although we’re afraid, that’s it. I go there no matter what expects me.
It's male in sentiment to start but the last line sounds like a Death Side lyric or something ... perfect backwards English that expresses the sentiment better than it could otherwise.
Bob Silvers died last week too. I think one person can make a real giant difference in the world. They just have to be an animal about it.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) the kind RW Apple used to wear.
(2) Russia, which at the time included Kazakhstan, Georgia, etc., which is where a lot of the banging weightlifters and had like 300 million people
(3) this is an insane oversimplification but is basically true...
(4) so like, your max is 100%, that's the most you can lift once. so 70% is way less. Say you are super weak and can only squat 440 pounds, then 70% is 308 pounds. Significantly less and a weight you can do a ton of reps with.
(5) (So if a lifter's competition attempt was, say, 200 kilos, and the lifter felt shitty that day they might only be able to do 185 kilos. So the workout would be at 90-95% of that, so 167-176 kilos or so. Lift the bar empty, then 70 kilos, 120, 140, 150, 160, 165, 167, and likely more until fail) There were rumors ... and this is getting byzantine ... that Abadjiev didn't program clean pulls for his lifters, and that they only pulled during lifts, but that was disproven in an interview with a lifter who trained under Abadjiev in the 90s I think. One interview with Abadjiev he apparently said that he wanted to get rid of the squat and front squat and just train the snatch and the clean and jerk and the lifts would go up but he was worried he'd fail. (Hard to find someone who doesn't think you need to squat.) Also he did a book that I think is "Secrets of Prosperity and Cavalry"
(6) Unreal line here in the story: THE ATHLETE in a Communist country is very aware of why and how he is used," says Suleymanoglu. "He knows he will be squeezed like a lemon until the juice is gone. In some ways it is the same in a free society." He shakes his head. "I guess that is the way of the world." Not into Communism, but true.