📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 3 November
Borislav Gidikov, born on 3 November 1965, owes his career to a bus driver's arithmetic. His father worked for Hebar football club and told him that a footballer's fortunes lie partly in the hands of ten team-mates, a weightlifter's in nobody's but his own. I find that hard to argue with, and the sums came out rather well in Seoul.
What happened on this day
English Wikipedia names Pazardzhik as his birthplace, while Bulgarian Wikipedia gives the village of Malo Konare in Pazardzhik municipality. He went to the Georgi Benkovski sports school in Pazardzhik, lifted for Hebar Pazardzhik until 1983 and for Slavia Sofia until 1990, and had Hristo Popov and Lyudmil Kochev as personal coaches. He was in the youth national team in 1982, and in the senior side the man in charge was Ivan Abadjiev, nicknamed the "Pope of Weightlifting", whom English Wikipedia credits with 12 Olympic champions and 57 world champions, a tally that would have British rowing fans reaching for a calculator. Bulgarian Wikipedia has Gidikov junior world champion in 1984 at Lignano Sabbiadoro in Italy, then junior world runner-up in 1985 in Edinburgh.
Senior honours followed. Bulgarian Wikipedia has him as world runner-up in 1986 and world champion in Ostrava in 1987, with European silver in 1986 and bronze in 1987. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics he took the 75 kg gold with six successful attempts, and since a lifter gets three snatches and three clean and jerks, that means he missed nothing, the weightlifting equivalent of a clean sheet. The Bulgarian page names Ingo Steinhöfel of East Germany and his compatriot Aleksandar Varbanov as the silver and bronze medallists. A torn tendon later ended his career, and the same page dates his spell as the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation's secretary general to 2012.
Why this matters for British expats
Britain brushes against his story twice. The 1985 junior silver came in Edinburgh, and Ricki Chaplin, a British lifter, competed in the same middleweight event in Seoul. To follow the sport in the Bulgarian press, the word to know is щангист (shtan-GHEEST), a weightlifter. If you live in Shumen, the sport is closer to home than a Pazardzhik birthplace suggests: Yanko Rusev, born in the village of Ivanski in the Shumen area, started out in football and wrestling, was spotted in Shumen by the coach Ivan Lechev, was turned down at 15 by a Sofia sports school that judged him a hopeless weightlifter, and was later noticed by Abadjiev, going on to Olympic gold in Moscow in 1980. Ivan Ivanov, born in Shumen in 1971, trained at the city's sports school, became a four-time world champion, won gold in Barcelona in 1992 and was made an honorary citizen of Shumen in 2021.
Sources and further reading
The biography draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Borislav Gidikov and its English counterpart, with Ivan Abadjiev's record from English Wikipedia and the British lifter from its page on Ricki Chaplin. The Shumen details come from Bulgarian Wikipedia's pages on Yanko Rusev and Ivan Ivanov.