The Strongest Man in the World; homeless!
Weightlifting is one of those sports that I cannot understand! I mean I really don’t get why some people destroy their spinal cords under extreme amount of pressure just to lift heavier weights! And above all do this for no good use! Would someone just tell me what the point of it all is?! Anyways, the other night there was this TV program called "Hot Seat" where they invite famous people to come and then they ask them all sorts of strange questions which are not likely to be asked in a normal interview!
This particular episode they had invited the world's strongest man alive which is an Iranian. His name is Hussein Reza-zadeh and he has world record in weightlifting, a record which is not easy to break, as I've heard. He comes from the Turk part of Iran, a city called Ardabil. In Iran we have many regional stereotypes which I will talk about in the future, but let me just say that for this region and its people, the general belief is that they are all as stupid as donkeys! Yeah I know it's not nice and it's not fair but stereotypes are never nice and they are nowhere near fair!
So in this program the presenter who is a prominent figure in Iranian radio and TV, called Dariush Kardan (another Turk!), asked Hussein lots of question and baffled the poor guy. I felt sorry for him and I felt sad. He's about 140 kg, I think, and the only thing he can do in his life is lifting weight, he has no knowledge of other things. He couldn’t even recite a line from one poem for God's sake! No books, no music, nothing; eating and lifting weight, finito! He has won many medals for Iran; he holds the world's and Olympics' golden medals. I think that's enough to call him a champion, isn’t it? Well besides my personal view on the field he has chosen, he is a national hero.
How do other nationalities treat their heroes? Our powerful hero doesn’t even have a house of his own and no-one is doing anything, even our president is powerless to help him because there are no laws for supporting people who bring honor and pride for our country because of their hard-earned success. They have promised him but I doubt that they would help him build a decent life for himself. The depressing point here is that he was offered 10 million dollars to join the Turkish team and he rejected the offer saying that he is an Iranian and he's going to remain one all his life. Do you know how much 10 million dollars is in our currency?! It's about 7, 8 billion Tomans!!! You know how many houses he could have bought with that kind of money, but he refused?
And still, to this day he doesn’t have a house of his own. All of our elites, all of our geniuses, all experts and people with brain emigrate from Iran to go where their brilliance is appreciated because here, if you decide to be a hardheaded patriot and stay, there is no guarantee that you will improve in your life. I have seen so many people like him, being superb in different fields from sports to science, who became disappointed at last and left.
Isn’t that just so sad?
