Behind Geoff Capes' huge frame was a gentle giant and a budgerigar's best friend - Mirror Online

Geoff Capes held the British shot-putting record for 23 years, lifted more weights than Arnold Schwarzenegger and twice wore the crown as the World’s Strongest Man.

Stick a cannonball under his chin with a splash of chalk like aftershave to help lubricate its release, and Capes could hurl it 21.68 metres. He was devastated not to win an Olympic medal after quitting his day job as a policeman, in defiance of Government orders, to compete in the heavily-boycotted Moscow Games in 1980.

But put him in a brute force heptathlon of bending steel bars, lifting a platform of bunny girls, overturning cars, pulling lorries, loading sacks of sand onto a flatbed truck, arm wrestling and tugs of war, and Capes was the most powerful man on earth in 1983 and 1985. Yet beneath the 6ft 5in and 27st of Lincolnshire brawn, he was a gentle giant who became a budgerigar’s best friend.

Sent to arrest a man for non-payment of a fine, on his beat as a Cambridgeshire copper in the 1970s, he looked through the suspect’s front window and saw a menagerie of exotic budgies. When the wanted man eventually appeared at the door, Capes asked if he could take a closer look at his flock of feathered friends.

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“We sat down, had a cup of tea and had a lovely chat about budgerigars. I did eventually remember to arrest him,” recalled Capes. “But he was very good about it and started me off with my first three pairs of budgerigars. I've never looked back.”

Geoff Capes, who has died aged 75, became president of the British Budgerigar Society in 2008. One of Britain’s most engaging sportsmen, and almost certainly the most powerful, he was a two-time Commonwealth Games gold medallist in Christchurch and Edmonton. And the colossus who grew up on a Lincolnshire farm lifting sacks of potatoes - up to 20 tons in as many minutes - won his first titles in the shot put ring in bare feet.

“It’s not about money, or having the right phone, the right TV or the right trainers,” he said. “When I started my athletics career, I went to the All-England Schools Championships and threw in the shot, on concrete, in bare feet because I couldn’t afford plimsolls. That’s why I walk around with no shoes all the time.”

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He was also a formidable one-man crime deterrent when ruffians came out to play. "I was a hell of a fighter,” recalled Capes. “If the next town came down on a Friday and there were only eight or nine of them I’d tell them to go back and get some more.”

As a measure of Capes’ mammoth strength, he could lift 660lbs in a bench press where poor old bodybuilder Arnie could manage around 525lbs. He was fuelled by a monster diet of red meat, a dozen eggs, baked beans, pilchards, cottage cheese, cereal, two loaves of bread and seven pints of milk.

But competing at Munich, Montreal and Moscow never brought him the Olympic badge of honour he craved after being forced to resign from his job in the police. He said: “Russia had invaded Afghanistan, and Margaret Thatcher banned all the services from going (to Moscow) – army and police – because they paid their wages.

"So I resigned from the police just before the Olympics. I lost my career, lost my pension, lost my income. They had total control over you.”