Shalamanov Shifts His Own Weight : Defection of World Champion Catches Many by Surprise

The world’s best junior weightlifters were ready for Sao Paulo, Brazil, but Sao Paulo wasn’t ready for them.

Even though the 1982 World junior meet was about to begin, the barbells that were supposed to be used were in a warehouse 80 miles away. Officials had to borrow weights. The platform was not in place. There were no judging lights.

As Harvey Newton, executive director of the U.S. Weightlifting Federation, recalled this week, most of the lifters, the majority of whom were competing for the first time internationally, were near panic.

An exception was Naum Shalamanov, 14, who never before had traveled outside Bulgaria but acted as if he had been everywhere and seen everything.

“He wasn’t fazed,” Newton said. “He impressed me physically, but the thing I noticed most was his psychological bearing. He already had the heart and head of a champion.”

Competing at 114 pounds, Shalamanov not only won in the 19-and-under division but also came within 5 1/2 pounds of setting an open division world record.

A year later, Shalamanov set two open division world records and, leaving the juniors far behind, finished second in the 123-pound class at the open division World Championships.

It was the last time he finished second at the World meet. He won in the 132-pound class in 1985 and 1986. He holds 11 world records, five of them in the open division, even though he technically will be a junior until January 1988. He turned 19 last month.

“Pound for pound, he was the greatest weightlifter the world has ever seen, one of the greatest athletes in any sport,” said Sam Coffa, president of the Australian Weightlifting Federation.

Coffa spoke of Shalamanov in the past tense because no one knows whether he will compete again internationally.

While attending a banquet with the Bulgarian team and other weightlifting delegations last Sunday night in Melbourne, Australia, where he had won his third World Cup championship, Shalamanov excused himself to go to the men’s room. That was the last Bulgarian officials or his teammates saw of him.

A Turkish-language newspaper in Melbourne reported three days later that Shalamanov, who is of Turkish descent, was hiding at the homes of Bulgarian-Turkish friends in the city and planned to seek political asylum in Australia.

There were no comments from Shalamanov, but the newspaper’s editor said the weightlifter wanted to escape the persecution of Turks in Bulgaria by the Communist government.

Friday, an Australian foreign ministry official said that Shalamanov had decided not to remain in Australia and was en route to Ankara, Turkey, where the Turkish government had agreed to grant him asylum.

Shalamanov is the most accomplished athlete to defect from a Communist country since Martina Navratilova came to the United States from Czechoslovakia. But Navratilova was then still rising to the pinnacle of her sport; Shalamanov is already there.

Considering that weightlifters usually do not reach their primes until they are in their late 20s or early 30s, the only question was how much further Shalamanov could stretch the boundaries of man’s strength.

He is pictured on the cover of the latest World Weightlifting magazine under the headline, “Best Lifter of Our Days (And of the Next Decade?)”

Yet, Shalamanov looks more like a jockey than a weightlifter. He stands 5-feet 1-inch tall, has filled out in the last couple of years to 132 pounds and has arms so short that the bar barely clears his head when he is lifting.

“A vest-pocket Hercules,” Terry Todd called Shalamanov after visiting him in Bulgaria for Sports Illustrated in 1984.

Only the second man ever to lift more than three times his weight, Shalamanov did it for the first time when he was 16. At the World championships last month in Sofia, Bulgaria, he lifted a world-record 414 pounds in the clean and jerk. The 325 pounds he lifted in the snatch gave him a total of 739 pounds, also a world record.

Until this week, he also was Bulgaria’s most beloved athlete.

Therein lies another difference between Shalamanov and Navratilova. Navratilova left Czechoslovakia to seek fame and fortune in tennis, eventually earning millions of dollars, but Shalamanov forfeited the comfortable life style that Bulgaria provides for its world-class weightlifters. As the most successful, he presumably was also the most comfortable.

Navratilova also was able to continue, flourish even, in her sport, but there is no such guarantee for Shalamanov. According to international weightlifting rules, he may have to wait until 1990 to compete again internationally.

That is based on a conservative interpretation of the rules, but considering that the general secretary of the international weightlifting federation is Hungarian and the vice president is Bulgarian, leniency is not anticipated.

Weightlifting officials and others who have had contact with Shalamanov were shocked by his defection, not only because he had so much to lose but also because they have never seen any evidence that he is politically inclined. Last year, he changed his name from Naim Suleyman--reported as Suleimanov in the Western press--to the more Bulgarian-sounding Naum Shalamanov, but that was believed to have been imposed on him by the government.

“If there had ever been any hint of this, I don’t think the Bulgarians would have allowed him out of the country,” Newton said.

Asked for his impressions of Shalamanov, Newton said he is “very quiet, sheltered, a true gentleman, as are all the Bulgarian lifters.”

Times reporter Gordon Edes, who interviewed Shalamanov in Bulgaria in 1984, said he found him to be “painfully shy.”

“You would envision a very strong personality taking an action like this,” Edes said of the defection. “He didn’t seem like the type who would become a rebel with a cause. Of course, that was two years ago.”

But after watching Shalamanov throughout the World Cup competition last week in Melbourne, Coffa, of the Australian Weightlifting Federation, had the same impression.

“He’s a very pensive young fellow, quiet, introverted,” Coffa said.

Coffa said he believes the defection was orchestrated by others in Melbourne’s Turkish-Bulgarian community. Shalamanov speaks no English except for the few words he has learned from American country-and-western songs that are popular among Bulgarian weightlifters.

Coffa criticized the Australian government because Bulgarian weightlifting officials were not allowed to meet with Shalamanov before he was put on a plane for Ankara. Bulgarian government officials also have protested.