Photo: U.S. Air Force, Ryan Crane via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Vegan arm-wrestler Sasho Andreev is a world champion again. The Bulgarian won gold in the 90kg right-arm competition at the 46th World Armwrestling Championships in Albena, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, and added a silver in the left-arm event, Plant Based News reports.
It was a home Worlds for Andreev. The World Armwrestling Federation expected more than 1,500 competitors, officials and supporters from over 60 countries at the resort for its flagship event, which ran from September 10 to September 22.
Counting his titles is a job in itself. The Bulgarian Armwrestling Federation credits him with 13 world titles, while Plant Based News puts his tally of world gold medals at 22, alongside 26 European golds. Either way, it is quite a haul for a man who has been competing since 2013.
Andreev stopped eating meat in early 2019 as a one-month experiment to see how he performed, and by September that year he had cut out dairy too. He has never looked back, and he told Great Vegan Athletes that pulses are at the heart of his diet:
I try to eat one of the three almost every day.
He means peas, beans and lentils. A typical day, he says, is "lentils, beans, peas, rice, potatoes, vegetable soup or salad, olives, nuts, fruits", with a vegan protein shake and multivitamin in the build-up to competition. He is also clear about how he gets his strength: "I have never tried steroid or anabolic ingredients," he told Great Vegan Athletes.
Last year Andreev won double world gold, and he joins a long line of plant-powered arm-wrestlers that includes Canada's Will Sarty, who won both arms at the Worlds. It has been a big summer for vegan strength athletes, with Tom Butts winning a third straight Natural World’s Strongest Man title and Angeline Berva setting an axle deadlift world record. And it was years ago that we said you don’t need meat to be strong.
Lentils in, gold medals out. No meat, no problem.