Known best among wider audiences for portraying Ser Gregor Clegane on HBO's Game of Thrones—better known as "The Mountain"—the 6'9", 452-pound athlete earned the title of World's Strongest Man in 2018, earned three consecutive Arnold Strongman Classics (2018, 2019, 2020) and currently holds the record for the heaviest deadlift at 1,104 pounds.
Bjornsson, 31, made his decision following his 10th-straight win at Iceland's Strongest Man competition where he finished first in all six events.
"Great way to finish my strongman career," Bjornsson said. "Now a different journey starts and I'm super excited. Maybe I'll never return but never say never right. I'm still only 31 years old and could come back in a few years if my heart wants it."
In 2018, Hafþór (pronounced half-thor) Júlíus Björnsson was playing fearsome Gregor Clegane, The Mountain, on Game of Thrones. Björnsson is from Iceland but also straight out of Norse mythology, a Leviathan whose character once crushed a man’s skull with his bare hands. That same year, Björnsson was, literally, the World’s Strongest Man, winning the made-for-television competition. Over a weekend in the Philippines, Thor, as everyone predictably calls Björnsson, flung kegs, tugged buses and lifted cars farther, faster and higher than any other contestant in the international field of Goliaths.
He was 29 then and weighed somewhere north of 425 pounds. Who knows, exactly. As he puts it with characteristic candor: “When you’re that big, you can lose a few pounds just by [going to the bathroom].” And today? As Thor often does, he fires up his calculator app to convert kilograms to pounds. He concludes that since his peak he has lost 130 pounds. Easily. Or, he says in his resonant baritone, rumbling laugh, “one wife.”
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