| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Number: | 41 |
| Format: | Multi-event competition |
| Current Champion: | Tom Stoltman |
Britain's Strongest Man is an annual strongman event held in the United Kingdom. Competitors qualify for the final through regional heats and the winner is awarded the title of "Britain's Strongest Man".[1] The competition is produced by TWI and serves as a qualifying event for the World's Strongest Man ("WSM") competition, also a TWI production.
See also: Strength athletics in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
In a history that has close parallels with that of the World's Strongest Man competition, the BSM competition has had a number of sponsors and, at different times, has had to vie with rival competitions that also claim to produce the strongest man in Britain as their champion. The inaugural competition was held in 1979[2] and was organised by TWI. It was broadcast by Thames Television for the ITV network that year, however coverage moved to BBC One in September 1982 until 1984 but returned in August 1999.[3] The final contest involved the field athletes Geoff Capes and Jim Whitehead, weightlifter Andy Drzewiecki, powerlifter Ray Nobile, Highland Games specialists Bill Anderson and Grant Anderson, wrestler Big Pat Roach, and Tosher Killingback; it was won by Geoff Capes.[4] The contestants were there by invitation and the format continued until 1984. There was then a break of three years, from 1985 through 1988, before the competition returned in 1989.
In 1986, there was a "Britain's Most Powerful Man" and, in 1988, a competition was organised by Geoff Capes and David Webster to find a successor to Geoff Capes, called the John Smith's Trial of Strength. The results of these competitions are often deemed to be equivalent to Britain's Strongest Man given the lack of a competition in those years. The IFSA, after its creation in the mid-nineties, managed the event but parted company with TWI and the BBC after the completion of the 2004 event. Despite this TWI have managed to have continued coverage of the event televised, with Sky One and Sky Sports covering it in 2005 before it moved to Five the following year until 2009. Digital channel Bravo covered the event in 2009 and 2010 before its closure; free-to-air channel Challenge took over coverage until it returned to Channel 5 in 2014.[3] The competition is currently sponsored by Met-Rx. As of 2017, Channel 5 currently broadcasts an episode devoted to the Britain's Strongest Man contest, as part of its annual World's Strongest Man coverage, in late December.[5]
Events for the competition include tyre flips, chain drags, Atlas stones and keg tossing.[6]
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In 2011, an event was organised in Boroughbridge advertised to allow spectators to see "top British strongmen compete to take a step closer towards a place at World's Strongest Man". The event was organised by multiple World's Strongest Man entrant Darren Sadler and the top two places, won by Rob Frampton and Jack McIntosh, received invitations to North Carolina to compete at the 32nd World's Strongest Man. Clash of the Giants was designed to fill the void left by the absence of the Britain's Strongest Man competition last held in 2008, much as the 1988 John Smith's Trial of Strength had been created following the discontinuation of the BSM in 1984. Unlike the BSM, which is the final stage of a knockout competition comprising a number of regional and national rounds, the Clash of the Giants was a singular event. Because there was no regional tiered competition preceding, it there was no prerequisite that the Clash of the Giants have a field of athletes representing each area of Britain and notably all the athletes competing were English. In addition, the three most successful British strength athletes actively competing at the time, namely Hollands, Felix and Shahlaei, had qualified for the WSM via international grand prix events and did not compete.
Pa O'Dwyer