The ObserverSportThe growing pains of the world's strongest boy
Medical experts were appalled. Richard Sandrak, driven on by his parents, looked more like a champion bodybuilder than an eight-year-old child. Seven years on, Andrew Anthony goes in search of the 'mini-Schwarzenegger' and finds a familiar tale from La La LandI am heading north out of Los Angeles on Interstate 5, bound for a meeting with Richard Sandrak. His name sounds like that of a double agent from the Cold War. Who is he? Just a few years ago it was claimed that Sandrak was pound-for-pound the most powerful human being on Earth. A documentary entitled The World's Strongest Boy brought him briefly to the attention of the British public in 2004. In the film we see footage of Sandrak on a Las Vegas stage, posing and flexing his muscles like a junior Mr Universe. He sports an eight-pack abdomen that looks as if it has been constructed in an engineering plant. Every sinew of his tiny frame seems pumped to the point of exploding. He is also a master of karate, and can do the splits and bend his body into unfeasibly contorted positions. It is said that he has less than 1 per cent body fat, which is fatally, lethally low. He can bench-press three times his own body weight. All this at just eight years of age.
The documentary is dispassionate, objective, sceptical, but mostly it is disturbing. Though it was aired in the UK when Richard was 12 and beginning to look less strange, it features images that are testament to a certain kind of child abuse. We are used to the cheesy Americana of child beauty pageants, but this is something else: a child's body that has not just been prettified, or even sexualised, but transformed into an anatomical freak show. It is impossible to watch without wondering about the sort of suffering or torment the little boy had endured to become a mini-Schwarzenegger.
Medical experts argued that such muscular development would require levels of testosterone that were simply not present in a child under 10. They speculated that steroids must have been administered, which Sandrak's mother strenuously denied. There was talk of six- or seven-hour training regimes, of thousands of press-ups, and it was revealed that the boy did not attend school but was instead 'home tutored'. In the background, his father, Pavel, lurked as a suspiciously malevolent presence.
After a stint doing the talk-show rounds, Richard and his parents, who originally come from Ukraine, dreamt of Hollywood fame and fortune. Pavel attempted to market his own fitness supplement. Then Richard's trainer and manager, Frank Giardina, fell out with Pavel. Giardina suspected that Pavel's unconventional parenting bordered on the criminal, and in turn Pavel, according to Giardina, threatened to kill him. They went their separate ways and not long afterwards Pavel was imprisoned for beating up his wife, leaving her with a broken wrist and nose. It was Richard who called the police - asking them not to use sirens, for fear of how his father would respond.
That was an awful lot of experience for a small boy to process. As I drive into the parched scrub of the Californian hinterland, I wonder what sort of character I am going to meet in a gym in the characterless outskirts of a small town called Santa Clarita. Will Richard have grown into a muscle-bound monster? An embittered adolescent? An alienated and angry youth? Or will he turn out to be some psychologically damaged former child star with only a history in front of him?
The 15-year-old I find in the gym is almost disappointingly normal. Short with a puppyish face, he is wearing shapeless basketball gear and looks thoroughly unremarkable, the kind of kid you would pass on any Californian beach without noticing. Now reunited with Giardina, Sandrak goes about his work out with minimum fuss, neither enthusiastic nor reluctant, but rather as if he is fulfilling a mindless but not unpleasant chore.
He trains five times a week, 90 minutes a session, but only when he has to get in shape for a part. After a year off, he is back on a strict diet and exercise regime, although nothing as daunting or all-consuming as that which adulterated his childhood, when he was urged to eat nothing but lima beans, for their protein content.
I speak to Giardina as Sandrak yanks on a column of flat weights. This being California, he fast-tracks the conversation to his celebrity client list. He has trained Elton John 'when he was on drink and drugs', Rod Stewart, 'a total gentleman' and Sylvester Stallone, 'a complete asshole'.
You get the impression that Giardina has much the same opinion of Sandrak's father. He tells me that Pavel was recently released from his prison sentence but is currently being held under psychiatric guidance. 'They're looking at whether they can deport him.'
Giardina first met Sandrak when the boy's parents brought him to one of his gyms. The couple had come to America in 1994 when Sandrak was two. They settled in Pennsylvania, where they began working on the boy's strength and flexibility while he was still an infant. They then headed to California, like countless thousands before them, with the intention of breaking into show business. It was to Giardina they turned for help in gaining publicity for their son.
Giardina was amazed at what he saw and realised immediately that he could turn the boy into a media sensation. Later, when I speak to Sandrak's mother, Lena, she tells me that she 'never thought about going to the media. It just happened.'
It's just one of a number of grey or disputed areas. A lot of the uncertainty stems from Lena's attempt to play down the weirdness of her son's early years. She refuses to speak about the abusive relationship she had with Pavel and, though she says she was 'concerned' about her former husband's treatment of their son, she insists that nothing untoward took place. The boy apparently started lifting massive weights simply because he enjoyed it and not due to any parental pressure.
'I've never been forced to train or do anything against my will,' Sandrak confirms. 'My parents used to train all the time and I wanted to join in. It was mostly my choice. It's just what I grew up doing. I was never forced. It was never an issue.'
But he seems to protest too much. His father made him sleep on the floor to maintain a perfect posture. This, too, Sandrak dismisses as 'no big deal'. He says the media hyped it all up as if he had been tortured. 'But it was just a phase trying out something different. Nothing important.'
The fact is, though, Sandrak was not allowed to mix with other children till he was 10. According to Giardina, he was forced to repeat intense exercises as punishment if he got something wrong. With Giardina's help, he was also turned into a bizarre spectacle for public consumption.
Yet when I ask him who his heroes are, he says: 'I have to say my parents are my heroes because they've helped me develop throughout my life.'
Does he mean his mother and father?
'Yeah, well ... '
'His father is no longer in the picture,' his manager, Marco Garcia, suddenly intervenes.
'Yeah,' says Sandrak, as if taking a cue, 'I meant my mom.'
It seems Sandrak was referring to Garcia as one of his 'parents', but I am informed that Lena and Garcia are not a couple, even though they may live in the same house. Lena herself is extremely guarded about her life, refusing to tell me what business she worked in. No doubt some of her caution is attributable to a fear of ever being 'found' by her former husband.
Still, there is a strong sense of evasion and denial from Garcia, Giardina and especially Lena. Garcia himself appears to have been influential in normalising Sandrak's life, or at least bringing it back within Californian standards of normalcy. Sandrak now knows what a pizza tastes like, and is also familiar with that defining teenage experience of doing absolutely nothing all day. Neither of which he could have dreamt of when his biological father controlled his life.
Though his background is in real estate, Garcia, like many other inhabitants of LA, is also something of a film producer. He has made Little Hercules in 3-D, which stars Sandrak alongside an unlikely cast list that includes Hulk Hogan, Judd Nelson, Robin Givens and Elliott Gould (as Socrates). 'Some really good players,' as Sandrak phrased it. And Garcia is also behind Sandrak's new project, whose working title is Fancy Moves: 'kind of like The Karate Kid with some hip-hop'.
It's for his part in this film that Sandrak has returned to training. Giardina tells me that within four weeks he will have his young charge looking ripped and in action-hero condition. This, it seems, is to be Sandrak's rather more tolerable future: periods of inactivity followed by intense spurts of getting fit for the screen.
'For now I just want to go out and make more movies,' Sandrak tells me. Then, switching to beauty-queen mode, he embarks on an unprompted speech about how he wants to help the world. 'What I've noticed a lot,' he says with a solemn smile, 'is childhood obesity. It's become such a big problem, especially here in America, that I feel I have to do something. Kids are going to be adults. They're going to be our future. Right now one out of three has a potential of dying before their parents. I want to get them eating right and doing sports one hour a day.'
I nod in sober agreement and then ask him how, as a Californian teenager, he resists peer pressure to drink and take drugs. 'I think of it this way: the kids that do that, how do they end up? They don't end up with successful careers in any good business. They end up working at McDonald's, and that's not a life I want for myself.'
And with that he leaves, followed, just like any other self-respecting minor celebrity, by his manager, his personal trainer and, of course, his mother. No longer the strongest boy in the world, he is just another kid looking to survive in Hollywood, making a fast buck but not eating the fast food.
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