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'The Mountain' from Game of Thrones picks up 1,104 pounds to set deadlift world record

nick bromberg
Senior writer
·2 min read

Hafthor Björnsson picked up 1,104 pounds with relative ease on Saturday.

Björnsson, the man who plays “The Mountain” on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” set a deadlift world record on Saturday when he became the first man to lift more than 500 KG. He broke Eddie Hall’s nearly 4-year-old record of 1,102 pounds.

Just look at how easy this 501 KG deadlift was.

There are a lot of men and women who have been lifting for a long time who can only dream of picking up 500 pounds, let alone 500 KG. And Björnsson looked like he had a handful of kilograms left in the tank, too.

Is it a legit world record?

Make no doubt, what Björnsson did on Saturday is one of the freakiest feats of strength in human history. But is it a “real” world record?

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, he completed the lift from his home gym in Iceland instead of at a scheduled competition in Bahrain that got canceled. And Hall doesn’t think the circumstances of Björnsson’s lift are worthy of a record because it didn’t happen during an actual competition.

Björnsson followed competition rules and took 15 minutes between each deadlift on Saturday, but Hall’s point is that only lifts that happen during competitions should count as records.

“We’re going into this pandemic and there’s nowhere to run and now he’s going to do it in his home gym,” Hall told Men’s Health in April. “He’s had plenty of opportunities — he could've done it in Dubai, late last year, in Europe’s Strongest Man [and at] Giants Live, it doesn’t feel right to me. Why not wait till this is over, till, I don’t know, October?”

It’s worth noting that Hall and Björnsson have been feuding for some time. If you had your world record lift broken either officially or unofficially by a guy you disliked, you’d probably be salty about it, too.

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

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