In these days when English sports stars crumple up before the onslaughts of invaders from overseas, it is gratifying to learn that there is at least one sport in which the Old Country can claim to be supreme. One often hears of our horizontal heavyweights who, according to most of the American sports scribes, spend all their time gazing at the stars, or of some of our best tennis stars being devastated by Donald Budge or Mrs. Helen Wills Moody with her blacksmith's arm, but how many people have heard of an English weight-lifter being beaten?
Today England's "weight-lifting champions stand on a level with the best the world can produce, and there are ten thousand of them in the country. Huridreds of these young men, drawn from all parts of the British Isles, and sometimes from such far away places as Singapore and Johore, compete twice a year for County, Divisional and British championship titles. Today Yorkshire, Scotland, the Midlands, London and several other districts have Leagues.
The Metropolis alone has thirty-three weight-lifting teams.
Two years ago Ronald Walker broke an Olympic record, the two hands snatch, 297% Ib, and since then he has gone on from success to success.
Every year British weight-lifters venture further and further \afield with great success, and one sincerely hopes that this sport, unlike boxing which England put on the map, or football in which our supremacy is now challenged by many different nations, will remain in England's keeping, if not for ever, for a good many years at least.—s.s.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.