World Strongest Men Rivalry on the Beach
History in Color:
2x Olympic champions, super heavyweight legends of Olympic weightlifting, Vasily Alexeev (left) of Shakhty, Russia, USSR and Leonid Zhabotinsky of Zaporozhye, Ukraine, USSR are having an armwrestling match on the beach in the summer.
Leonid Zhabotinsky (1938-2016) won the Summer Olympics in Tokyo (1964) and Mexico City (1968). He was the strongest man in the world in the 1960s. Zhabotinsky won 4 World, 2 European and 5 USSR titles and set 19 world records.
Vasily Alexeev (1942-2011) became a super heavyweight Olympic champion in Munich (1972) and Montreal (1976). He was the strongest man on the planet in the 1970s. He won 8 World, 8 European and 7 USSR Championships and set 80 world records.
Timeline transition of the strongest man title from Leonid Zhabotinsky to Vasily Alexeev was rather smooth and without hard feelings in the interviews and stories. It definitely couldn’t be compared to the similar transition between Yury Vlasov and Leonid Zhabotinsky in the mid 1960s.