The Most Dangerous Gym In The World
These lifters have achieved world-class strength lifting in a dirt lot located in an Egyptian slum. What’s your excuse for not getting stronger? (Photos: Max Siegelbaum)
Violence occurs often in Al Warden, a run-down industrial neighborhood in Alexandria, Egypt. Men young and old carry matwas, an Egyptian variant of a switchblade knife. Taxi drivers blast frenetic Egyptians tunes as they speed by, racing to escape the poorly lit, smog-filled slum.
Tonight in Al Warden, in a dusty plot of land surrounded by barbwire, a powerfully built man stands in a tracksuit. His silhouette is illuminated by faint streetlights that glow from afar.
“Allahu Akbar!” the man shouts into the night. A teenage girl cries out as she heaves an improbably large barbell overhead.
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Her arms lock. Then she steps back and flicks the weight, letting it crash onto the ground in front of her.
The man in the track suit, Mohamed Sayed El-Ramadan, acknowledges her good form and calls for another person to step up to the lifting platform to practice the barbell snatch.
Night by night, in this plot of dirt, Ramadan has turned the neighborhood’s poor young men and women into world-class Olympic lifters.
He’s sent four competitors to the Summer Olympics, including his daughter Nahla Ramadan. Nine of his students have won medals at the World Weightlifting championships, and 17 in the African championships.
“All these kids became world champions from a few pennies,” Ramadan says.
Indeed, Ramadan funds each lifter with what little money he has. And running this “gym” is a constant struggle.
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“In this yard, there were people selling and shooting drugs,” he says. Ramadan kicked out the junkies, squatters, and vagrants, and then built a weightlifting platform. Then he bought a steel box to lock the weights inside at night.
Local criminals and drug addicts still eye the plot, though, and they occasionally come to throw rocks at the kids to dissuade them from training. “This sport is all about concentration,” he says. “How can you concentrate with that going on?”
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Each workout is not only a physical struggle, it’s a social struggle, too—that’s been especially true after the Egyptian Revolution in 2011.
One day, a group of bearded men carrying knives, machetes, and swords roamed through Al Warden looking for a fight. On the gym’s perimeter fence, Ramadan had hung a photo of his daughter Nahla shaking hands with former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The group took it as a public display of support for Mubarak and a confrontation ensued, he says. “There was a huge fight. I could feel a sword passing beside my ears.”
No one was seriously injured, but those incidents loom in the back of each lifter’s mind every time he or she steps to the platform.
Nahla, 27, began training when Egyptian women began competing professionally, in 1996. Since then, she has competed in the Olympics in Athens in 2004, and in London in 2012. Each of Ramadan’s lifters shoots for the world stage.
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“Our next goals are the World Championship next year in the U.S. and the 2016 Olympics in Rio,” she says.
"When we go to championships, the other competitors don’t believe we are training on the streets. We keep coming back here because we believe in this place and we want to make something out of it,” says Nahla. “We could be training at any club in Alexandria—they would be very happy to have us—but we feel we can’t train with anyone but Ramadan.”
Like any good coach, Ramadan has a certain implacable magnetism that draws neighborhood kids. He treats his students as if they were his own children, taking them on trips to the beach and elsewhere.
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In the chaos of Al Warden and modern Egypt, his gym is a safe space and a second family to many of these kids.
“He encourages us, and no other coach can do as Ramadan does,” said Henaa Raafat ali, a 13-year-old student of Ramadan. “Honestly he is our father, our mentor and everything.”
Despite the word class level of Nahla and Ramadan’s other pros, they train at the gym right alongside young boys and girls.
The kids find their heroes at the gym, says Ramadan. This at a time when the female lifters need them more than ever: Over the past several decades, Egypt has grown increasingly conservative.
Women are expected to stray away from physical activity and sports, and stay close to home. What little public space that exists in a place like Al Warden is reserved for men. Young women lifting weights—not to mention side-by-side with men—is almost unheard of.
Doing it in public takes supreme courage to withstand the ensuing social alienation and ostracism. Even the men lifting with the women catch blame.
But it’s these brave, dedicated athletes—who have built incredible strength from nothing—that Ramadan says will rise above the politics of the slums, to the world stage.
“Come, come here and see the future,” he says.
By Max Siegelbaum
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