Go up to the fifth floor of UT Austin’s Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium and you’ll find yourself face to face with a 10-and-a-half-foot-tall copy of the Farnese Hercules. This towering nude statue, admired for its detailed depiction of musculature, marks the entrance to the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports.
This hidden gem is a research center dedicated to what the university defines as physical culture—the ways people have historically strengthened and enhanced their bodies.
Jan Todd, and her husband Terry Todd—a weightlifter, coach, scholar, and author who collected many of the artifacts on display—worked for decades to found the Stark Center and co-directed it until Terry’s death in 2018. Hunting down collections of photos that were on the brink of deaccession and buying strongman ephemera at auctions, they rescued artifacts that established archives disregarded as irrelevant to their missions of supporting research and education.
Sports-related objects were overlooked because sports history was seldom incorporated into courses at universities in the 1980s, Jan says. “That has completely shifted,” she tells me. The Stark Center’s archives are a key resource for classes on history, sports, sociology, art, literature, and sport management.
As the center’s director, Jan, who was a powerlifter herself, works to fill the information gap on strength and physical culture for researchers because for her, these histories were a source of personal inspiration.
“When I began training in the 1970s,” Jan said at the museum’s 2011 opening, “I clearly remember how important the photos of Betty Weider in the Weider magazines were to me as a young woman trying to decide whether it was OK for me to lift weights.”
At that time, Jan says, there weren’t very many women at all who lifted weights. “It was a thing that was often much discussed,” she says.
The Stark Center serves as a corrective. Its museum documents the presence of women in the world of weightlifting and bodybuilding. There’s Kati Sandwina, born in 1884 and billed as “the World’s Strongest Lady,” who could lift her 200-pound son overhead with one hand, and performed with the Barnum & Bailey circus. There’s Betty Weider, “the definitive supermodel of the 1950s,” who appeared on the covers of fitness magazines created by her eventual husband Joe Weider. And both directing the Stark Center and appearing in its exhibits, there’s Jan Todd, who was declared the strongest woman in the world by Sports Illustrated in 1978.
In the center’s elegant reading room, research-minded visitors can examine materials related to UT Austin athletics and sports history, with an emphasis on weight training. The archive holds one of the world’s most important collections of “alternative” health literature, the 1968 U.S. Olympic team oral histories, the papers of significant weightlifter David Willoughby, and materials related to performance-enhancing drugs, among other topics.
In its museum, a wealth of artifacts tell the history of strength. There are one-of-a-kind barbells, 100-year-old lithographs promoting strongman acts, photographs from Muscle Beach, and objects that illustrate the life of Tommy Kono, recognized by the International Weightlifting Federation in 2005 as the greatest weightlifter of the previous hundred years.
The museum’s exhibits are wide-ranging, with sections dedicated to golfer Harvey Penick and the stadium’s namesake football coach, but the majority of the Stark Center’s exhibits combine to illuminate several throughlines from the history of the iron game.
One of these is the theatrical. Nineteenth-century circus posters, Mr. America magazine covers, and ephemera relating to The Arnold Classic, all speak to the showmanship inherent in the sports of weightlifting and bodybuilding. Posing, flexing, and performing dramatic lifts, weightlifters throughout the Stark Center’s exhibits are both athletes and performers, harnessing the drama of their sport to expand its audience. Muscle Beach regulars often had Hollywood careers as stunt men and women, and as the culture and the sport evolved, the exhibits attest, so did the opportunities to appear in the limelight.
But although showmanship is a part of the story, the weightlifting exploits documented at the Stark are the real deal: horseshoes, steel rebar, and a penny bent by strongmen are all on display.
The Stark Center’s exhibits reach almost to the present: a recent update to the galleries celebrates Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, aka “The Mountain,” breaker of multiple world records. And as the history of strength sports continues to unfold, and the Stark Center will continue to build its collections, sharing the story, and power, of weights with the world.
