He’s the strongest firefighter in the world. He’s Dwayne Drover, a Waterloo firefighter who won the World’s Firefighter Combat Challenge in Las Vegas last weekend.“I won the world championship,” Drover said Monday. “It is still surreal. I still don’t believe it.”
He beat 100 other teams from around the world and beat the American firefighter who has held the world’s title for the past three years.
“This is the race that is going to go down in the books,” Drover said of beating the previous three-time champion.
“I was considered the underdog going into it and I came out on top,” said the 34-year-old firefighter.
The competition involves a gruelling obstacle course.
Firefighters, dressed in their uniforms, complete with helmets and oxygen tanks, drag about 20 kilograms of hose up more than six flights of stairs.
They haul another 19 kilograms of hose up by rope and then must run down the stairs without missing a step.
They tackle a “forcible entry machine,” where competitors must move a 63-kilogram pressured device 1.5 metre by hitting it with a rubber sledgehammer.
Firefighters drag a 153-kilogram running hose 22.5 metres and then hit a target before navigating a series of pylons.
Then there’s Rescue Randy, the 79-kilogram dummy that competitors drag backward 30 metres.
They must finish in less than two minutes.
Drover did it in one minute, 26 seconds.
“It is what they call the toughest two minutes in sports,” said the five-year firefighter.
And what’s the attraction of putting yourself through this ordeal.
“I just love challenging myself,” Drover said.
He takes the sport so seriously that he trains up to 30 hours a week and works with a personal trainer.
And he plans to defend the title next year.
“Getting there is hard enough, but keeping it is ever harder.”
Article courtesay of The Record.
Becky Harmata
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