Dales folk

Lie on your back on a bench, take a 14 stone man in the palm of each hand, lift them both into the air and hold them there ... without wavering, swaying, or collapsing.

This successfully completed, you might be a third of the way to becoming a champion athlete.

Les Pilling does this sort of thing for fun. And glory. And he'll be doing it again in the heat of battle in France next month when he competes in the European Power Lifting Championships in Lyon.

Les, Bentham born and bred, is arguably the most successful athlete that Craven has produced for generations, the current British, European and World Power Lifting Masters Champion.

Not bad going for a 43-year-old who stands 5 feet 2 inches in his socks - "unless I am beginning to shrink, that is."

There is, however, a bit of a catch in that title: the word masters means that all the competitors are over 40, the veterans of the sport.

And, for Les, that is not enough: he wants to be British open champion again, as he was from 1993 to 1997.

Then, last year, a young whipper-snapper in the RAF, Mat Saunders, took the title at the age of about 26. Les wants its back.

"He took me by surprise last year," says Les, who earns his living driving a fork lift truck. "But I'll get me own back this time. I refuse to accept that sixteen or seventeen years makes any difference."

He is hyping himself into a similar mood to take on another arch-rival, the Russian Maxim Turgenev, who is threatening his European Seniors title.

But after they have clashed on June 27, the two will go out and have a drink together, the Russian drinking (of course) vodka and Les having a beer or two and perhaps even a whisky.

He'll have a thirst, no doubt: he only allows himself a drink after championships. In the long months of training before hand, he never touches a drop. This, to say the least, is somewhat unusual for a former rugby front row forward.

"I gave up rugby when I realised I could make it to the top in in power lifting," he recalls sadly, for he misses the game. "But I daren't risk an injury on the rugby field which could have damaged the lifting."

Now there are people who might think, with some justification, that Les was here swapping the frying pan for the fire. Weight lifting at his level is pure self-torture, with countless hours of training interspersed with necessary but never-the-less tedious interference from officialdom.

It is, in the old British tradition, a purely amateur sport but its ruling body is run by a semi-commercial body calling itself by the oddly descriptive name of the British Power Lifting Association (Drug Free) Ltd.

As it was East European athletes in sports like weight lifting who first introduced steroids into athletics - and therefore did untold harm to the Olympic ideal - the name speaks for itself.

But it means that Les and his colleagues are under constant surveillance - "I've undergone more tests that a whole laboratory full of guinea pigs," he says ruefully. "It's got to be done, of course, but it can be a bit of a bind."

In France, Les will be competing with the three classic lifts: the squat, at which his best is 315 kilos - equivalent to four big fellas - the deadlift, at which he has lifted from the floor to his waist 320 kilos, and the aforementioned back press, which is done lying on a bench (Les's record: 182.5 kilos).

He will, of course, be competing to his fierce best. But for the support of a Bentham businessman, however, he would not be there at all.

For some years, Les was sponsored by Angus Fire Armour, the local fire equipment company. When the company changed ownership, however, Les lost his backer and for a while thought he might have to quit the sport, another sad example of how this country treats its all-too-rare champions.

Fortunately, Bob Cattley, who runs a quarry engineering and services company, stepped into the breach. So it's Allez France for Les. We wish him a strong arm, the victor's laurels ... and hope he enjoys that well-earned beer..

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.