 to Blankety Blank and Super Gran (who he nearly killed with a stray throw of an enormous tree trunk). Now 73, Capes is seated in a chair that looks like the throne of a giant fairy-tale king and simply raises an eyebrow as I read aloud his old food diary. 'Twelve eggs!?' he snorts. 'I could eat that now. I ate like a f------ horse! Anything I could get my hands on. But nearly all protein. It's like a steam engine. Put the coal in. I was burning up to 10,000 calories every four or five hours.' Capes, who would lift 120 tonnes in training per week, then smiles as he recalls the sponsorship deals that helped him bypass amateur rules that once governed Olympic sports like athletics and swimming. 'Butcher Brown is the best in town,' he says, parroting the slogan from one meat provider, before remembering how his Talbot Estate car had the words 'Dewhurst: Master Butchers' emblazoned on the side. It was a small price to pay for an endless supply of steak. There were also deals with the Glenryck pilchard company and a local milk producer. 'My weekly wage with the police was £9.50 – so I couldn't live off that,' says Capes, who succinctly sums up the official assistance for athletes like him who were combining full-ti){kind=link}
Exclusive: British shot put record holder for the past 51 years looks back on his remarkable athletics career, diet and feats of strength
Six pounds of red meat. A dozen eggs. A large tin of baked beans. Two tins of pilchards. One and a half pounds of cottage cheese. A packet of cereal. Two large loaves of bread. A pound of butter. A pint of orange juice. And seven pints of milk.
No, this was not a family’s weekly supermarket order. It was simply the reported daily intake of a man who was once not just officially the strongest man on the planet, the best shot putter in the world and a six-times Highland Games Champion, but the winner of a world title for breeding budgerigars.
Geoff Capes was also one of the most recognisable faces in the country, appearing prime time on every programme you can imagine from This Is Your Life and the Sooty Show (where Sweep dreamed of beating him at the tug of war) to Blankety Blank and Super Gran (who he nearly killed with a stray throw of an enormous tree trunk).
Now 73, Capes is seated in a chair that looks like the throne of a giant fairy-tale king and simply raises an eyebrow as I read aloud his old food diary.