This article is about the power and courage of our fellow Ukrainian, about his unique achievements, good enough to be recorded in the Guinness book. He does not do it for new records but to prove that we forget about the older generation in vain. Our elders are our teachers, and there is still much we can learn from them.
Our lazy-minded descendants can put the blame for all present evils and complications on the older generation; they justify their inability to listen and learn useful experience by the frenzied pace of our times. This is primarily how I can explain that a man who has fan-clubs in Europe and America is not famous in his own country. Tsezar (Caesar) Veslovutsky in his early seventies is already four times world champion and has set numerous world records in weightlifting.
Do you happen to know a man in his sixties who can lift 100 kilograms? Veslovutsky has just brought home another gold medal from the World Championship among veterans — his fourth. He brought it home and invited me not to the solemn meeting in the official surrounding, but to the small gym, built by his student, referee, and European and world veterans tournament prizewinner Vakhtang Ubiriya, who is also almost fifty.
Vakhtang Ubiriya is famous in Ukraine for being a leading railroad expert. And this duo with a combined age of over of over 120 years do pushups and sit-ups with weights over 120 kilograms. Seven and ten year olds peep through the windows and sometimes come in. You might ask why two respectful men need this. Both teacher and student have but one answer: “We don’t do it just for our health. We do not need much from life now, but there is no other way to support people’s faith in their own abilities, no other way to pass along hope to distrustful young citizens, because no one believes words and promises anymore.”
Tsezar has many students, numerous achievements, and has coached many athletes, but time proved that not many people “can take the blow of the times we live in.” Vakhtang Ubiriya could have become disabled after working 18 hours a day and suffering from an ulcer if Veslovutsky had not found him and brought him back to the platform. Now ten years later Ubiriya has forgotten all about disease.
The example of his older friend and coach led him to build and equip a weightlifting gym (he made all secondary equipment himself). Now this gym forges new records and victories in the world and Europe tournaments of veterans, develops the idea of a Sports Veterans Organization, which will exist informally and remain out of the public eye. It will work without demanding anything from the government except attention and introduction of its tournaments into its timetables, because promising brain potential, unique experience, and knowledge are being left behind.
I recommend that any doubting Thomas meet Tsezar Veslovutsky and his student, Vakhtang Ubiriya. I call them by their names, because it is just not possible to call them veterans — young, modern, cool dudes. They do not live in successful countries but in ours, a country standing at the crossroads in the middle of shock, but still a powerful nation. So congratulating our unique world champion and Guinness Book of Records laureate Tsezar Veslovutsky on his fresh victory and old laurels, let us congratulate ourselves on the fact that such people live next to us and gladden us, men of whom we can say: “such a people is unbeatable!”






