Who is this Englishman voted the world’s strongest man and former rugby player?

On a podcast hosted by Joe Marler, the former England prop, Eddie Hall (1.88m, 164kg) talks about strength, the body and its limits. Between laughs, a quieter past surfaces: that of a teenager who played rugby, long before becoming The Beast, alias “the world’s strongest man”. A forgotten origin that casts the British colossus’s career in a different light.

They did not meet on a muddy pitch on a winter Sunday, but in a studio, microphones open, humour raw. Joe Marler, an emblematic prop of English rugby, welcomes Eddie Hall, a former World’s Strongest Man. The exchange is free-flowing, sometimes absurd, often introspective. And yet, running beneath it, something connects them: the same culture of collision, the same education of the body, forged very early by sports that let nothing slide.

Before the outsized loads, before the 500-kilo deadlift that wrote him into history in 2016, Eddie Hall was a Staffordshire teenager immersed in high-intensity sport. Competitive swimming, daily training and, among those formative disciplines, rugby. Junior rugby, with no professional career and no recorded feats, but enough to shape a relationship with the body and with effort.

“A sport where you learn to take it”

Hall does not talk about it as a broken dream. He does not idealise it. Rugby is part of the backdrop of his early years, by his account a “tough, structuring team sport, where you learn to take it, to go forward despite the impact, to accept the hierarchy of the group“. For a teenager who was already huge, already powerful, rugby is a school of channelling. Brute force is tolerated there, but never enough on its own.

That spell in rugby fits into a bumpy personal journey. As a teenager, Eddie Hall left school early, went through a period of deep unhappiness, and saw his original sporting ambitions, in swimming in particular, slip away. But the body remained central. At sixteen, he discovered weightlifting. The logic is relentless: moving from the collective to the individual, from the scrum to a one-on-one with the bar.

In his exchanges with Joe Marler, that shift resonates. Marler, a former prop, “knows that fragile line between useful force and excessive force“. When he questions Hall, it is not the record that interests him, but what came before: learning hardness, accepting pain, building a sporting identity locked very early into the body.

For Hall, rugby is never presented as a “missed destiny“. It is a foundation. One discipline among others, but an essential one in the making of an athlete who would become, in 2017, the first Briton crowned World’s Strongest Man in more than twenty years. In that journey, rugby appears as a first language: spoken briefly, then replaced, but never forgotten.

In conversation with Joe Marler, Eddie Hall reveals what the honours list does not say. That monsters of strength are not born in weights rooms, but in fragmented journeys, often collective ones, in which rugby sometimes serves as the very first scrum.