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A Scout's Feats in War and Peace: About Nikolai Nikolaevich Saksonov
English summary of Tyazhelaya Atletika. Ezhegodnik 1983 (Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport, 1983), pp. 74–76: the text is paraphrased, not translated; figures are the original images.
A tribute for Saksonov's 60th birthday (1983), opening with an epigraph by Arkady Vorobyov.
War service (1941–45)
- Called up in autumn 1941, aged 18; infantry school, then the front near Moscow in mounted reconnaissance, on almost nightly missions behind German lines.
- Wounded four times — explosive bullets through the right and later the left forearm, a shin wound, and a Soviet anti-personnel mine that shattered his rifle — each time returning to the front until the war's end.
- Summer 1943: in a reconnaissance-in-force, carried a captured German back alone; awarded the Order of the Red Star. Holds many other combat orders and medals.
Sporting career
- Demobilised at 23; in Sverdlovsk a factory fitter and evening student at a physical-culture college.
- February 1946: on the advice of Boris Nazarov (Lokomotiv) began training under Ivan “Uncle Vanya” Lebedev, the old “professor of athletics”.
- Three years later: champion of the Russian Federation, national team. February 1949: featherweight snatch 105.5 kg, a world record (beating Fayad, Egypt) but 3 kg below Georgy Popov's all-Union record; he then learned from Popov.
- First post-war lifter to replace the “scissors” split with the feet-sideways squat catch, adopted from Popov and improved.
- Rival: Rafael Chimishkyan (Tbilisi), featherweight from 1950. 1952 Helsinki Olympics: Chimishkyan gold, Saksonov silver (missed 140 kg overhead).
- 1953 Stockholm, the first Soviet world team title: world and European champion at 30. 1954 Vienna: team reserve.
- Winter 1958, aged 35: tenth and last world record — lightweight jerk 154.0 kg in Volgograd, 0.5 kg above the 20-year-old record of Shams (Egypt), which Ivanov, Nikolai Kostylev, Viktor Bushuev and Melbourne Olympic champion Igor Rybak never beat.
- Early 1970s: still competing past fifty in Moscow, including against his son Aleksei, a Master of Sport.
Medicine and teaching
- 1958: qualified as a physician. Moved to Volgograd, headed a department at the physical-culture institute, then left to be a village doctor.
- 4 April 1969: Candidate of Medical Sciences (Ivanovo Medical Institute), thesis on weightlifters' energy expenditure at rest, in training and at moderate altitude; chief opponent Prof. S. S. Serebryannikov.
- Invited by Vorobyov, then head of weightlifting at GTsOLIFK (State Central Institute of Physical Culture, Moscow); has taught there for over 15 years.