Goldfish Memory

This sport will NOT remember you

Being enrolled in a university with a powerlifting team, I get to keep my finger on the pulse of the minds of fresh entrants into the sport when I attend their events. Most kids on the team discovered powerlifting through the people at the recreation center, which is great! It is awesome to see the sport grow in new manners.

While I don’t expect them to know everything and everyone off the bat, every now and then I namedrop a lifter I assume they’ll know and get verbally sucker punched when I hear “I’m not sure who that is.”

I want to make something clear as well: I’m VERY aware I’m a fucking dork, and they’re not going to know older or foreign lifters like Jon Cole, Yevgen Yarymbash, or Jonas Rantanen. I also am aware that most of these kids are raw lifters in the USAPL or Powerlifting America sphere, so I’m not going to be astounded they don’t know the current top equipped lifters or even some of the middle of the pack untested raw ones.

However, I have met quite a few that don’t know who Dan Green is. None of them know who Jesse Norris is. Some don’t know Ray Williams. These people should be right up their alley! They are only very recently retired and were very popular in their heyday, so I’d expect the names to at least ring a bell.

Dan Green did his last meet in 2021 and his prime was through the 2010s. Jesse Norris is a bit further removed having done his last meet in 2016, but he still remains in the top 100 on the first page of OpenPowerlifting, and Ray Williams is one of the biggest raw squatters the USAPL has ever seen and is still competing.

So what’s the point of me saying all of this?

I hear people talk about leaving a legacy or throwing around “that’s why nobody will remember your name!” The latter is ultimately correct no matter what the hell you do in the sport. Not only will your records be broken, no matter the monumentality of your accomplishments you WILL be forgotten by powerlifting.

This isn’t a bad thing, it should just serve as a reminder that you need to be lifting for YOU and not anybody else’s approval or memory. If you chase such, you are all but guaranteed to be disappointed.

There is one asterisk to all of this- they do all know of Ed Coan. So if you want to be remembered, you just have to be better than the GOAT. Good luck!