1000g

The only man never beaten in fifty years of professional wrestling was a five-foot-seven Punjabi who drank ten litres of milk a day, ate half a kilo of ghee and six pounds of butter, and offered to fight any wrestler in the world for the title without once being taken up on it. Ghulam Mohammad, the Great Gama, was born in Amritsar in 1878 into a wrestling family and was winning tournaments at ten. He trained in the mud pit the way the Indian akhara had for a thousand years: five thousand bethaks, the deep squat, and three thousand dands, the dipping press-up, every day, then forty bouts against forty men in turn until the last one was thrown. The diet was the fuel for it and it was almost entirely animal. Milk by the bucket, butter and ghee by the pound, chicken, mutton, and a paste of crushed almonds stirred into the milk as a tonic. In 1910 he went to London and challenged the world. He threw the American champion in under two minutes, then stood in a ring against Stanislaus Zbyszko, the Polish world champion, for three hours while the bigger man lay flat on the mat refusing to be lifted. When Zbyszko failed to turn up for the rematch Gama was handed the belt. Frank Gotch and Hackenschmidt were both challenged. Neither accepted. He wrestled until he was past fifty and was never thrown. At partition in 1947 he stood in a Lahore street and fought off a mob to protect his Hindu neighbours. He died in Lahore in 1960, aged eighty-two. Bruce Lee studied his training and copied the squats. The modern wrestler studies his diet and reaches for a tub of powder. A man built almost entirely out of milk and butter fought everyone alive and won every time, and the sport has spent the century since looking for something more scientific.