Igor Rybak

When you think of traditional Jewish sports, weightlifting usually ranks somewhere between competitive bullfighting and NASCAR. The stereotype, after all, involves carrying heavy books, not heavy iron. Yet, if you dive into mid-century Soviet athletics, you will find an astonishing number of Jewish strongmen proving that lifting enormous barbells over one's head was, in fact, a very viable way to survive the USSR. Enter Igor Rybak.

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Rybak took up weightlifting in his late teens and promptly tore through the Soviet lightweight division. In 1956, he went to Melbourne for the Summer Olympics, where he clean-and-jerked his way to an Olympic gold medal, edging out his own teammate and setting an Olympic record in the process. He added a European championship that same year for good measure.

Like many Soviet Jewish athletes of his era, Rybak’s Jewishness was mostly documented through state identification rather than synagogue attendance, given the USSR's notorious allergy to organized religion. But his heritage was entirely Jewish, meaning for at least one glorious afternoon in Australia, the strongest lightweight human on the planet was one of ours.

After retiring from the platform, Rybak completed his medical degree and worked in sports medicine in Kharkiv, gracefully transitioning from the barbaric art of heaving iron to the thoroughly Jewish tradition of becoming a doctor. You can't ask for much better kvell than that.