Naim suleymanoglu biography

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If he eats in a restaurant, no one will ask him to pay. According to Alan Abrahamson in the Los Angeles Times, a Turkish television sports director said of Suleymanoglu, "If he comes to a roadblock when he is driving, it is removed for him. Announcer Lynn Jones said, "You have just witnessed the greatest weightlifting competition in history," according to Ken Jones in the London Independent.

In 1992 at Barcelona, he defended his Olympic championship despite his recent retirement, and won his third Olympic gold medal in 1996 at Atlanta. Born Naim Suleimanov and of Bulgarian Turkish descent, he had made the decision a year before after he was quite upset when the Bulgarians changed his name to Naum Shalamanov in 1985, to remove vestiges of its Turkish origins.

The last straw came one day when Communist officials showed up with a television crew and told him to say that he had always been Bulgar, and that the only reason he had a Turkish name was that his ancestors had been forced to adopt one by the Ottoman rulers. I am human. His odd proportions worried his mother.

When he began lifting weights as a boy, she worried that the weights would compress his body even more and make him stop growing. Once in Turkey, he changed the name again to a more Turkish one.

Everybody makes failure. Duncan noted that Croatian weightlifter Nikolay Pechalov, who beat Suleymanoglu and took the gold, said, "Naim is still the greatest weightlifter on the planet." Suleymanoglu said, according to Jones, "That's for others to decide.