Retired lady from Ulyanovsk exercise with 200-kilogram weight

57-year-old Tatiana Fomina from the city of Ulyanovsk suffers when she has no weight for exercise around.
The retired lady spends her spare time in the gym. Exercising with weight of 200 kilograms for her.

Tatiana Fomina does powerlifting – lift weight from horizontal position, when she stands and also drop curtseys with the weight. Then the three weights are added to obtain the result. Ms. Fomina’s result is 470 kilograms.

Tatiana set up a meeting with me in a gym. I was looking for some athlete with huge muscles, but I saw a short slim lady. I asked in surprise, “Are you Ms. Fomina?” The lady approached the weight, added some more metal plates to it and drop curtseys as easy as if she just put a towel on her shoulders. She said, “140 kilograms is easy”.

Ms. Fomina has been doing sports all her life. When in school, she was in volley-ball and skating teams.   The coaches predicted her good future in sports and were very surprised when 19-year-old Tatiana decided to get married. They wanted her to pursue career in sports. But the girl wanted to have a family, and her fiancй Nikolai, boxer, said that being married did not ban her from sports.

”However, a month after the marriage the husband said: no sports”, Ms. Fomina says. “In addition, Nikolai was an extremely jealous man: he even forbade me to speak with other men. No female of male friend of mine visited us because of my husband”.

Despite the husband’s ban on sports, Tatiana continued to take part in skating and cycling competitions for the team of the technical school she was studying in. In March, 1967 she had a baby, and the husband imposed taboo on sports for her.

When her son Alik was three years old, Tatiana divorced the husband as she could not tolerate his temper any more. She tried to return to sports, but too much time had passed. Tatiana is sure now that she would have succeeded in sports, but would not have had such a nice son if she had not got married.

She did not marry for the second time: she raised her son, then she cared about her sick mother. She thought she had quit sports forever.
 
However, some changes occurred in her life in 1980 after she was awarded with the trip to the Olympics in Moscow for her public activity.

”I was at the final competition and the closing ceremony”, Tatiana says. “I was thinking that I could be among the sportsmen. When the bear, the symbol of the Moscow Olympics, was going up the sky, I was crying like a child. I swore to myself that I would return to sports again. On coming back to Ulyanovsk I joined the city jogging club. First time exercising was hard for me as I had gained some weight and had not exercised for a long time. It was hard for me to run even 10 meters. Only 1.5 years later I could run 10 kilometers, and when I turned 40, I was running marathon.

The doctor recommend Tatiana to take up powerlifting as this sport would constantly keep her organism  fit. In 1994 Tatiana approached the weight for the first time. 6 months later she took part in Russia championship on powerlifting for seniors. Now she has many medals and diplomas for winning competitions.

Tatiana says that powerlifting is a very intelligent sport. She realized her dream to win world powerlifting championship for seniors.

The lady has never used her strength to protect herself. She says with a laugh that she is ready to fight, but there is nobody to fight against: she has become a celebrity in her native city and every person on the street greets her with respect.

”I retired two years ago and now enjoy myself”, says Fomina. “I get up at 8am, do morning exercises and have a cold shower, and go to the gym three times a week. I feel as if I am 30, and hope to set new records in sport”. 

Sergey Pustovoitov