Chautauqua County’s Don Reinhoudt strains against the weight of an impressively loaded barbell.Credit- Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame
The Strongest Married Couple on the Planet
By Richard G. Waite
All who saw it would never forget. Using his exhaled breath, he blew up a hot water bottle until it resembled a distended balloon. And then it popped! To the toddlers and teens at Cassadaga Lake’s beach, it was the grand finale to a 1980s mid-summer strongman performance. Prior to the hot water bottle demonstration, an iron bar was bent, a spike was driven by hand into a block of wood, boards were broken bare-handed and both a license plate and a phone book were ripped in half. Those acts of muscular might were accompanied by a softly spoken message that strength of character is much more important than physical prowess.
The practitioner of those feats and the deliverer of that message was Donald C. Reinhoudt. Few in that audience realized they were witnessing a performance by a world-renowned powerlifter and, indeed, by “The World’s Strongest Man.” Interestingly, at that time Don lived in Brocton with his then-wife Cindy Wyatt Reinhoudt, a woman who could lay claim to an equally stellar and decidedly pioneering career in the weightlifting community. In fact, people at that time would proclaim that Brocton was “the home of the strongest married couple on the planet.”
Born in 1945, Don attended high school in Fredonia. A natural athlete, he excelled in basketball, where he could rattle the hoop by launching his 6-foot, 3-inch, 225-pound frame skyward for slam dunks. He shot putted on the track team, where he heaved the 12-pound cannon ball 52.5 feet (five feet beyond today’s high school average) and played All-Conference-level football.
He next attended Parsons College on an athletic scholarship and exited with a finance degree. There Don was introduced to a weight training regimen in preparation for his activities on the football team. He also competed on the track team, putting the 16-pound collegiate shot and hurling the discus. While at Parsons, Don aimed for a berth on the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team, participating in six qualifying competitions. None of his coaches, however, understood the technicalities of the Olympic lifting events and, poorly prepared, Don’s Olympic dreams went a glimmering. It wasn’t all for naught, however, for while competing in a 1967 meet in Columbus, OH, a young woman official caught his eye. An ensuing three-year romance resulted in his 1969 marriage to Cindy Wyatt.
A voracious competitor, Cindy had raced out of the athletic starting blocks. Born in 1944, she attended Williamsville High School where she excelled in the shot put and discus on the track team. A 1961 athletic scholarship led her to the University of Hawaii, a track and field powerhouse. There she trained under two-time Olympic weightlifting gold medalist Tommy Kono and competed hurling both shot and discus. The extent of Cindy’s achievements in high school and university, as recorded by the Chautauqua County Sports Hall of Fame, were truly amazing:
As a teenager, she was a member of six All-America track and field teams (1958-59, 1961-63), and set four national age group records in shot put. She was a two-time National Indoor Champion in the shot put (1961, 1963), and National Outdoor Champion in Girls Division in shot put three times (1958-59, 1961) and discus twice (1958, 1961). When she didn’t win, she was certainly in the hunt, placing second in shot put seven times in U.S. National Outdoor Championships (1961-66, ’74) and discus three times (1963, 1965-66).
Her 1963 win in indoor shot put saw Cindy launch the women’s 9-pound collegiate iron sphere 48.5 feet. That same year, she attained silver in shot and 6th in discus in the Pan Am Games held in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She enjoyed an active competitive schedule during the decade, starring on multiple U.S. teams that faced off against those of the Soviet Union. Like Don, she also aspired to Olympic competition. She placed fourth in the 1960 trials and qualified for the U.S. team four years later in shot put, placing third in the trials.
Cindy next set her sights on powerlifting and its three competitive categories—the squat lift, the bench press and the deadlift. In 1965, she entered a Kenmore, NY, powerlifting meet, making her the first female to compete in a weightlifting contest of any sort in the world. She weighed 150 pounds, and her results in that event became the women’s inaugural baseline results. In a powerlifting competition, the weights lifted in each of the three categories are reported and the total of all three are added together. Cindy’s results were:
Bench Press- 160 pounds
Squat Lift- 235 pounds
Deadlift- 315 pounds
Total- 710 pounds
Over a decade later, in 1977, Cindy Wyatt Reinhoudt competed in the first-ever National Powerlifting Meet for Women and reappeared in that role the following year. In both years, she won the Best Lifter trophy. Cindy retired from competitive lifting in 1978. That year, she posted stats that were a dramatic improvement over her 1965 results:
Bench Press- 205 pounds
Squat Lift- 385 pounds
Deadlift- 385 pounds
Total- 975 pounds
Upon graduating college in 1968, Don Reinhoudt spent the next 10 years working as an accountant in his father’s Fredonia accounting firm, commuting down Route 20 from his home in Brocton. Unfortunately for those ruled columns of numbers, accounting increasingly took a back seat to Don’s avocation. He was bitten by the iron-lifting bug and was encouraged by Cindy to enter the powerlifting arena. Commercial gyms were unheard of in Chautauqua County at that time and, coached by the more experienced Cindy, Don spent his off hours clanking plates in a basement gym he built for himself in his parent’s basement. There, the duo’s efforts were serenaded by overhead piano solos played by Don’s talented dad.
Throughout his powerlifting career, then, Cindy Wyatt Reinhoudt remained Don’s coach, both on and off the platform. While Don trained, Cindy would spot weaknesses in his technique and guide him to improvements. She was always ready with encouragement and could be heard voicing positive utterances from the competitive sidelines. Amazingly, she could hand off 650-pound barbells to a prone Donald during his bench press training sessions!
Thus inspired, Don began to bulk up as his training routine kicked in. As fellow weightlifting champion Terry Todd described it, “So naturally when he began hitting the weights, the size came quickly as the muscles began to pack themselves into the nooks and crannies of his titanic frame.” As for the details of that frame, “Don’t doubt for a moment that he is a spectacularly big man,” Todd continued. “He wears a 15 EEE shoe, is between 6-foot, 3-inches and 6-foot, 4-inches tall and has weighed as much as 380 pounds. Without exercising or ‘pumping up,’ his chest is 60 inches, neck 22 inches, and his upper arm is 22.75 inches. The most amazing thing of all, however, is that of his monumental forearms. Lord have mercy! An 18.5-inch forearm!”
Each thigh was 34 inches. In fact, Don’s massive frame once got him into a tight spot. Having spent the night in a Birmingham, England, hotel room, the next morning he jumped into the diminutive bathtub to freshen up. He discovered that he was stuck, and while his powerlifting teammates anxiously awaited his late arrival in the lobby, he and Cindy struggled mightily to extricate him from that enameled grip. He later reported:
Well, I tried. She grabbed my arms and my wife is one of the strongest women of all time. So we tried, but we couldn’t break that suction. ‘Well I’ll call Larry and we’ll get a couple of the guys and we’ll get you out.’ I said ‘NO WAY!!!’ I mean this was unbelievable. So we worked and worked really hard and we broke that suction. Water all over the bathroom. We had a tidal wave in the bathroom, but I made it down and everybody said ‘How come you’re so slow?’
Don’s typical event weight averaged out at around 365 pounds, which placed him in the Super Heavyweight class. Thus prepared, he first came to prominence by placing 3rd in the 1972 IPF World Powerlifting Championships. As this was only the second annual such event, Don can certainly be characterized as one of the pioneers in powerlifting, and for the next several years he went on to dominate the sport, being victorious in four meets, three of which were concurrently sanctioned by both the International Powerlifting Federation and the Amateur Athletic Union:
IPF World Powerlifting AAU U.S. National Powerlifting
Championships Championships
1973- 1st 1973- ----
1974- 1st 1974- 1st
1975- 1st 1975- 1st
1976- 1st 1976- 1st
In accomplishing this, Don became the first and only person ever to win four straight IPF championships. Each of those events witnessed struggles to lift massive weights within the three classic powerlifting categories, and Don became the only man in his weight class to simultaneously hold IPF world records in each of the three lift categories, as well as in total weight. In fact, in 1975, Don exceeded the 2,400-pound barrier for the first time in powerlifting history, a record that wouldn’t be broken until 2013:
Squat Lift- 935 pounds
Bench Press- 626 pounds
Deadlift- 885.5 pounds
Total- 2,446.5 pounds
Those official results were exceeded on two occasions with a 1,000-pound squat and a 904- pound deadlift. Massive lifts, they were disqualified on technicalities and do not appear on the official record. Reinhoudt would hold all the powerlifting records during his career, setting or breaking over 40 of them, justifying his being labeled as “one of the strongest men who ever walked the earth.”
As might be expected, records in the three powerlifting categories have passed on to others since his participation in the sport, weight records that surpass what Don accomplished. There is a caveat, however. Don attained his records in powerlifting while “unwrapped.” In other words, he lifted without the help of the lifting suits and arm wraps encountered in events since that era. Competitive lifters today are said to be “wrapped,” and such suits are a high-tech advantage in the lifting game. Lifters have not necessarily gotten that much stronger than Don. Equivalent to the arrival of the fiberglass pole vault pole in track competitions, lifting wraps have resulted in quantum leaps in lifting potential. Because of this, historical lifting records are now categorized by those who lifted “raw” (unwrapped) and those who have lifted as wrapped competitors, and Don Reinhoudt is now seen as the “king of the raw lifters.”
Having conquered the powerlifting heights, Don next stormed the World’s Strongest Man mountaintop. Initiated by CBS Sports in 1977 and taped at the Universal Studios Theme Park in California over a multi-day period, each yearly “WSM” contest was an amalgam of glitzy TV entertainment and genuine powerhouse prowess. Its early invitational format saw professional football players, body builders, Olympic weightlifters and famous powerlifters engage in titanic struggles between one another and against the clock.
Events included traditional strongman challenges imported from the Scottish highland games like caber (“telephone pole”) tossing and mano-a-mano tugs of war. Timed events like the heavily loaded (750-pound) wheelbarrow race, loaded refrigerator race (where competitors struggled down a 100-foot lane with a loaded 425-pound refrigerator strapped to their backs) and loaded tram pull were also included. Overhead beer keg lifts, overhead log lifts and automobile lifts were par for the course. Color commentary and interviews were supplied by famous sportscasters Brent Musberger and Tom Brookshier, both dressed in the bell-bottom pants that were de rigueur fashion at the time. Technical insights were supplied by Terry Todd.
Don first competed in the 2nd Annual WSM meet in 1978. He came in second place. There were, however, several highlights that kept him in the hunt for most of the competition. He started off well with a first-place, 270-pound overhead beer barrel lift, a feat much more difficult than first thoughts might suggest. The barrel was loaded only one-third full with a suspension of lead pellets in water, which sloshed around, unbalancing the keg in an alarming manner. Tom Brookshier would describe that lift as attempting to control “a rattlesnake in a gunny sack.”
His next first was in the car lift, a task similar to the powerlifting deadlift. Hefting a bar attached to the rear bumper, Don managed to lift and hold off the ground the rear wheels of a battered Peugeot 403, the car Peter Falk drove in Columbo. Loaded with steel plates in the trunk, its gross weight was 2,345 pounds. The actual poundage lifted was unclear as the front wheels were a fulcrum point in what was essentially a second-class lever. It was, however, demonstrably heavy as it defeated all comers except the Brocton strongman.
A third first-place event for Don was perhaps the most “Hollywood.” It was equivalent to the powerlifting squat lift with a major twist. Called “the girl lift,” much of the 790-pound load on the bar was not iron plates, but an overhead platform attached to the bar holding a bevy of six Lost Angeles Rams cheerleaders.
His last highlight, the tram-pull, almost ended Don’s powerman career. Attached via harness and a length of chain to a 7,800-pound tram, and straining mightily like a Volga boatman, he pulled that vehicle to the end of the 100-foot lane in winning time. There, the tram’s inertia carried it into Don, who lay prone from exhaustion at the finish line. An ice water bath served to ameliorate the pain of a severely scraped arm, and Don soldiered on in his competition efforts after taking first place in that event.
Don’s 1978 second place showing in the World’s Strongest Man contest demonstrated his willingness and capability to compete, and he again entered that arena in 1979. He got off to a good start that year, emerging victorious in the challenging barrel lift event, upping the game by hoisting an “animated” (as Terry Todd called it) 300-pound beer keg overhead.
Brent Musberger called the powerlifters in the WSM meets the “300-pound buffalos,” and Don proceeded to prove the power allusion by squat-lifting 1,000 pounds of Playboy Bunnies, taking first in the “girl lift” event. Next, Terry Todd pointed out that you had to be “agile, mobile and hostile” when attacking the rigors of the tram pull, and Don Reinhoudt proved to be just that, dragging a 10,000-pound tram 100 feet for a first place finish.
Much of the 1979 battle of titans proved to be a seesaw between the contestants, with success in the events parceled out between various competitors. In the end, it transpired that the World’s Strongest Man title would be determined by the last event in the competition, the mano-a-mano tug of war. There were four qualifiers in the two-round rope pull. Three 300-plus-pound powerlifting “buffalos”—Bill Kazmaier, Lars Hedlund, Don Reinhoudt—were joined by the much-lighter, but muscular, Jon Kolb.
The first-round matchups pitted two beefy lifters, Reinhoudt versus Kazmaier, followed by Hedlund, a weightlifting champ and lieutenant in the Swedish army, versus Kolb, an offensive lineman for the Pittsburg Steelers. Unfortunately, Don lost to Kazmaier in the last five seconds of that first-round struggle. Amazingly, the significantly lighter Kolb then beat the heftier Hedlund. He was definitely a sleeper, who the patently arrogant Kazmaier intended to brush off in the last-round tug. Grit and stamina won out over body mass and hubris, however, and Jon Kolb took first in the tug of war event. That allowed Don to claim the WSM trophy based on the total number of points he had accrued over the course of the five-day meet. At 34 years of age, Don Reinhoudt was indeed the World’s Strongest Man, a fact that the delighted Jon Kolb along with the attendant crowd happily endorsed.
Don returned to defend his WSM title in 1980. Things did not go well, however. Although victorious in a 20,000-pound tram pull, he tore his left hamstring muscle and ripped his right bicep muscle from the bone in two heavy-load lifting events and retired from the competition early.
Throughout his lifting career and beyond, Don exhibited a gentility not expected from physically dominant men and an overwhelming friendliness toward others. During competitions, he would stop to chat, take photos with and sign autographs for admirers. As an American Strength Legends column has pointed out, “Of course his reputation is true. He is the nicest man on the planet.”
Due to powerliftings’ amateur status, it was not a sport engaged in to make money, and because of the episodic nature of the World’s Strongest Man’s “professional” monetary awards, Don was always employed full-time in the civilian ranks throughout his lifting career. Those employments included working as an accountant, working at the Cassadaga Job Corps facility as a youth counselor and working as the Chautauqua County Director of Youth Services. That youth orientation led the gregarious giant out into the field to high schools, campgrounds and beaches, wherever a youthful audience congregated. There, his native talent at muscularity was employed as a fascinating accompaniment to his message of positive character development.
Still active with the youth community during retirement, his message included condemnations of alcohol and drug abuse. Always drug free, both Don and Cindy each personally experienced the negative effects of the drug culture among competitors at athletic events. She had witnessed them in her track competitions against steroid-enhanced Soviet and Eastern European teams and they had both experienced a highly placed WSM competitor under the influence of cocaine. (Constantly inhaling the drug from his wrist wraps, in the middle of an event he slapped his girlfriend in a fit of rage. The fiery Cindy instantly threatened him with retaliatory Wyatt mayhem and Don warned him off in a menacingly subdued manner.) Over the years, Cindy and Don worked within the ranks of both track-and-field and powerlifting organizations to bring about the official condemnation of drug abuse and the establishment of anti-doping programs.
Still appearing before high school audiences, Don’s message was one of striving in positive ways for happiness and success. He encouraged teens to “depend on and believe in yourselves,” stressed that getting a good education should be their number one priority and that “the strengths of love, heart and soul are the best strengths of all!”
Don and Cindy lived in Brocton for 35 years and raised two children, Ben and Molly. The couple was amicably divorced in 2004. Along the way, Cindy had obtained her Ph.D in psychology from The Ohio State University. She has since retired after spending a career as a professional in the geriatric therapeutics community in Columbus.
In 2007, Don attended a spaghetti dinner at Chautauqua County’s Lily Dale. There, Pam Swanka, an attractive nurse, (a Parkside Avenue and Buffalo St. Mark School gal and Lakeshore Hospital employee), drifted into his line of sight. She instantly became food for thought in the big guy’s mind. He married that quietly elegant woman soon after and they lived a life of active retirement in the Dale. Sadly, Don Reinhoudt—“The World’s Strongest Man”—passed away in 2023. It’s a certainty, however, that the heaven he inhabits is warmed by the presence of the Gentle Giant!
About the Author
A frequent contributor to Western New York Heritage, Richard Waite is a retired teacher who taught history, psychology and sociology at Williamsville North High School.
