Eleven days ago, Raúl Flores had a 504 kg lift and an asterisk. The weight was astonishing, but it had been lifted in his own training environment. There was no competition referee, no official down signal, and nobody independent confirming what was actually loaded on the bar.
Men’s Fitness Online asked the obvious question at the time: would it survive a real platform? Raúl Flores’ 511 kg deadlift, set at the World Deadlift Championships in Birmingham, is the answer.
That article closed on a simple point: on the day, the bar would be loaded by somebody else, a referee would decide when the lift was finished, and the man who owned the record would be standing a few metres away. All three of those things happened. The asterisk is gone.
This time, the lift counted
Flores warmed into the competition with a clean 470 kg, lifted well within himself. Then the bar went to 511 kg, one kilogram past Björnsson’s standing world record.
It broke from the floor with real speed. Above the knees, it slowed hard against his thighs, the kind of sticking point that ends most attempts. Flores didn’t let it end there. He ground the bar up to full lockout and held it until referee Magnús Ver Magnússon, a four-time World’s Strongest Man himself, gave the down signal.
Suits and straps are standard equipment under these strongman rules, and nothing about Flores’ lift breached them. It’s worth being precise about what this record is and isn’t: a conventional strongman deadlift record, set under strongman judging, not a raw or drug-tested powerlifting result. Different sport, different rules. Both are real.
Watch Giants Live’s footage of the lift.
The Mountain chose the title
Björnsson pulled 480 kg himself, then stopped. Injury problems through his competition preparation had made another crack at his own 510 kg record too big a risk, and Giants Live reported he chose instead to focus on the overall Strongman Open.
That decision paid off. Björnsson won the overall event. Flores won the World Deadlift Championship, the single discipline everyone in the arena had actually come to see settled.
There’s no version of this where Björnsson lost anything. He made a call, backed himself on the events that mattered to the overall title, and took it. Then he did the harder thing: he came out from backstage to congratulate the 26-year-old who had just taken his record off him.
The promise behind Tayzon
Once the lift was done, Flores showed the crowd a tattoo on his shoulder: his late dog.
Giants Live reports that the dog’s death was what first pushed Flores into a gym. The nickname he now competes under, “Tayzon”, is the dog’s name. Flores has said he made himself a promise after his dog died: that the name would one day be known around the world.
A 511 kg deadlift, in front of Magnús Ver Magnússon and Hafþór Björnsson, in a full arena, is a fairly emphatic way of keeping it.
The record now belongs to him
Before Birmingham, only Eddie Hall and Björnsson had ever pulled 500 kg or more in a sanctioned conventional strongman deadlift. Flores is the third man into that group, and the only one currently holding the record.
Eleven days ago, MFO wondered whether a gym lift could survive competition. This time, somebody else loaded the bar. A referee decided when it was over. The record-holder was standing close enough to shake his hand.
