Pioneers of Olympic Weightlifting
History in Color:
One of the rare group shots of the earliest Olympic weightlifting pioneers in the USSR (left to right):
Front row:
Alexander Miezitis (former wrestler and Latvian Olympian (1912), one of the key organizers of Olympic weightlifting in Latvia), Alexander Bukharov (also known as Uncle Sasha), Jan Sparre;
Back row:
Iogann Sipol (?), Ivan Suslov (?), Karl Freyberg (?)
Unfortunately, the exact location and time of the initial black-and-white shot is not known. The initial guess that photo was made somewhere around the 1st National Championship of the Soviet Republic in 1918.