Four Days with Mitchell Hooper at the World’s Strongest Man Competition
When it’s his turn onstage, Hooper deadlifts a staggering 1,025 pounds. Then the weight increases. When he tries 1,080 (about the weight of an adult male polar bear) for his next attempt, he can’t complete the lift. He barely looks up from the ground as he walks off the stage and directly to his coach, 11-time WSM competitor Laurence Shahlaei.
“It just felt heavy,” I overhear Hooper saying. Shahlaei nods and puts his hand on Hooper’s back. “We really needed that,” he says. “Yeah, I know,” Hooper replies softly, his gaze still fixed on the competition floor. Together they stand and watch the remaining athletes.
In events where Hooper does well, he heads right back to the athlete area to relax. When doesn’t, he tends to hang around to see how things shake out.
His mom, Bonnie, who’s maybe half the width of her son and a foot shorter, is on the sidelines watching. She tells me he’s always been like this. When he was a kid playing golf, if he knew the shot was good, he wouldn’t even glance toward where it went.
“But if it was bad, he’s watching,” she says. “He’s looking.”
When I later spoke with Hooper about this moment, he told me that missing that lift, the one everyone predicted he would nail, was about more than losing a few points.
“It makes you question, ‘Well, if I can’t do the thing I thought I was guaranteed to be able to do, what am I going to be able to do?’” he tells me. “You start to have feelings of self-doubt creep in.”
Over on social media, the fans’ attitudes continued to turn. “What is wrong with Hooper?” wrote one commenter on a video Shahlaei posted to recap the event. “That deadlift is shocking for him,” wrote another.
Meanwhile, everyone I speak to says they still expect Hooper to pull off the win. When I ask him how everyone’s expectations are weighing on him, he gives me a resigned laugh.
“Either I win a show or I have to explain why I didn’t win,” he says.
Dominating the next event, the Hercules Hold, will be crucial. With one arm casually slung over the back of his seat and a game of solitaire paused on the phone he’s holding with the other, Hooper gives a half-smile to the camera as he explains that if he can pull off a win on this one, he can still take the whole thing. To do that, he’ll have to support two Roman-style leaning columns weighing 350 pounds each with his outstretched arms. This event, Bonnie tells me from the sidelines, is in the bag.
“I have never seen him have a mark and not beat it,” she says.
