Yury Petrovich Vlasov is a former Olympic heavyweight weightlifter for the Soviet Union, a writer and a politician.
Education
Yury studied at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy in Moscow, from which he graduated with a Gold Medal in 1959. In Academy he became interested in weightlifting, joined Armed Forces sports society and soon became Master of Sport of the USSR (1957).
Career
Between 1959 and 1963 he won all the competitions he participated in, with a huge success at the Rome 1960 Summer Olympics where he beat the world records three times, becoming the first man to clean and jerk more than 200 kg (202.5). He was proclaimed the best sportsmen of the 1960 Olympics and the "Strongest Man on the Planet". He was considered a nerdish intellectual in rim glasses, going against the stereotypes attached to weightlifting.
At the 1964 Summer Olympics he finished second, after another Soviet weightlifter, Leonid Zhabotinsky, and retired from the Olympic Team.
After retiring from weightlifting he became a writer and a politician. Due to his damaged spine, for a few years he could not walk and moved in a wheelchair.
He is the author of several books: "Overcoming yourself", "Salty Joys", "The Special Region of China" (about his father), "Flaming Cross", "Rus' without a leader", etc.
Between 1968 and 1976, he published his works in the Soviet Union. But after his work ("Flaming Cross") was published in the West, he was consider a mild dissident and was not published in the Soviet Union.
In 1987, after Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, Vlasov became chairman of the Federation of Athletic Gymnastics of the USSR.
He was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies for the Lyublyansky district of Moscow in 1989 and broke from the Communist Party. In parliament he started as a member of the liberal Inter-regional Deputies Group, along with Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Sobchak and Boris Yeltsin, but later became close to nationalists and Christian Democrats.
In 1993, he was elected to the State Duma of the Russian Federation. He was a candidate in the 1996 Russian presidential election but only received 0.02% of the vote (the second-to-last result amongst the ten participants). Following this he apparently retired from politics.
In 2004, at age 69, he took part in veteran's competitions and was able to lift 185 kg.