Pure relief could be seen on the face of Martins Licis after he easily threw the 420-pound Inver Stone replica over the bar at the inaugural Rogue Invitational strongman competition...
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Pure relief could be seen on the face of Martins Licis after he easily threw the 420-pound Inver Stone replica over the bar at the inaugural Rogue Invitational strongman competition.
It wasn't just because Licis had earned the largest sum of money for one contest in strongman history (just over $133,000), nor was it just because he had beaten 2021 WSM champion Tom Stoltman on his best event... Martins Licis had also shown the strongman world that his 2019 World's Strongest Man title was no fluke, and that he was finally on the rise again. This was a first competition victory for Licis since the 2020 Arnold USA, nearly two years ago.
The Rogue Invitational started with the highly anticipated Elephant Bar Deadlift. Unfortunately, Brian Shaw and Mikhail Shivlyakov respectively sustained hamstring and calf injuries in this event, while previous issues prevented Jerry Pritchett, Rob Kearney and Mateusz Kieliszkowski from achieving their best lifts.
This left the door wide open for Jean-François Caron, who only gave "80% effort" to get the event win with 926 lb / 420 kg. Tom Stoltman (911 lb) and Martins Licis (906 lb).
The next event, the Cyr Dumbbell Ladder, was all about Oleksii Novikov. The Ukrainian, who lifted a 153.2 kg dumbbell in training recently, cleared the entire set of five weights while no one else got more than three. Licis finished 2nd and Stoltman 5th - the only event in which they were separated by more than one place.
The athletes opened up day two with the Wheel of Pain and, with so many athletes injured, no one managed to push it to Licis's record distance of 119'9, set in 2019. Instead, Stoltman held off Licis for the win with just over 89 feet, meaning that the gap between the leaders was down to a single point.
In the penultimate event, the athletes had to carry a 454 kg yoke for 15 metres before completing 3 reps of a 163 kg log lift. Jean-François Caron set the early pace in 54.51 seconds while Luke Stoltman surprisingly struggled, but it was Mateusz Kieliszkowski who stole the show, viper pressing the log in order to finish in just over 40 seconds. Oleksii Novikov almost beat that time, but stumbled on his last press and had to take a few seconds to recover before trying again.
Tom Stoltman delivered a clean run, finishing in 50.65 seconds to put himself into second place, but Martins Licis did more than enough to beat that time, his 43.33 giving him a two-point lead before the final event.
The five Inver Stone replicas, ranging from 125 to 191 kg, proved challenging for the first eight athletes: only Caron was able to complete the set. Tom Stoltman then went, and he made the stones look easy, stopping the clock in 29.16 seconds. This meant that Licis had to beat Caron's time of 42.45 in order to win the contest.
And it was a piece of cake for Martins. He blew Stoltman's time out of the water and, as is tradition, screamed out his own first name after finishing.
Licis, who missed the last two World's Strongest Man competitions due to a plethora of injuries, will be a major threat to Tom Stoltman and Oleksii Novikov next year. Mateusz Kieliszkowski, meanwhile, took 4th place behind Novikov at the Rogue Invitational in spite of a lat injury... 2022 should be a thrilling strongman season!
