As has been the case in previous years, Brazil will be the first stop of the season for some of the best pro strongmen in the world on Saturday, February 13 as the 10th edition of
Força Bruta takes place.
Not all of the best athletes will be there, of course. As is tradition, only 4 strongmen have been invited to Cotia, in the state of São Paulo, to take part in the 3-event competition. The Força Bruta format (4 athletes, 3 events) has been unchanged since 2016 in order to fit within the live television show
Esporte Espetacular, which airs on TV Globo - the largest commercial television network in Latin America and the second largest in the world.
An Interesting Mix of Athletes
Among the 4 competitors, only
Rauno Heinla has participated in Força Bruta before. Last year, the Estonian was edged out for the overall victory by Russia’s
Mikhail Shivlyakov, who sadly cannot make it to Força Bruta this year due to a plethora of injuries.
Shivlyakov has been replaced by his protégé,
Dmitrii Skosyrskii, an impressive contender who nearly won the
2020 Arnold Amateur Strongman World Championships before being edged out on the last event by fellow Omsk resident
Evgeny Markov.
The 23-year-old Russian doesn’t just have to worry about Rauno Heinla. Also in the contest are
Rob Kearney, who finished 6th at
last year’s Rogue Invitational, and
Jean-François Caron, the 9-time World’s Strongest Man finalist who will be looking forward to his trip to Brazil in order to get away from the frigid Québec winter.
Caron enjoys traveling abroad for competitions: last year, he told
Strongman Archives that "in the end, prize money and results are nice, but years later, the experiences are what we remember."
The Trio of Events
Força Bruta will kick off at 9 am local time with the Deadlift for reps. In a similar setup to what we’ve seen at World’s Strongest Man in past years, the athletes will lift a cage that increases in weight with each lift… except instead of barrels, people will be used as weights. Caron and Heinla, two deadlift specialists, will be looking forward to this one.
Next up will be the Keg Toss: 10 kegs ranging from 18 to 26 kg, to be thrown over a 5-metre barrier. This will be a very tough test! Only 8 kegs were used in the past two years.
And, just like in 2021, the contest will end with the Truck Pull. It should be the same setup as last year, which everyone had managed in 45 seconds or less.
A Rich History
Brazil is not known for producing the greatest strongmen in the world, but Força Bruta has proven popular enough to remain featured within the
Esporte Espetacular TV show for a decade.
In 2013 and 2015, the competition was held in conjunction with the Arnold Sports Festival South America, while Strongman Champions League organized it in 2014. It then moved from Rio de Janeiro to Santos in 2017, before settling in Cotia the following year (the 2018 edition was a team contest which saw Poland’s Mateusz Kieliszkowski and
Krzysztof Radzikowski beat Brazil’s
Tiago Aparecido and
Marcos Ferrari). Out of the first 9 editions of Força Bruta,
Brian Shaw has been the most successful athlete, winning the contest 3 times in 4 appearances.
