Photo : Mike Ehrmann ( Getty )

Jay Farrant is the head coach of the Ireland Powerlifting Federation, as well as one of the owner of one of the country’s most prominent weightlifting gyms. He also has ideas about what the Nazi party didn’t stand for.




This all began with a post from PowerliftingWomen, a relatively popular Instagram page that has been rather vocal in its opposition to white supremacist views in the powerlifting community. Farrant responded to PowerliftingWomen’s post and asked them, “What is a Nazi?” The owners of the Instagram page clarified that they were being purposefully vague about a famous powerlifter who had Aryan tattoos (that lifter appears to be Brandon Allen). They tried to talk with Farrant about the spectrum of white power iconography, but Farrant had other ideas about “the true ideology behind National Socialism.”


Farrant explained that the Nazis had “some brilliant ideas,” and also that racism is an inherently British ideology. When asked about the Holocaust, Farrant didn’t have time to discuss that.

Farrant’s gym, A.B.S. Powerlifting, flies both the Confederate flag and the German empire’s WW1-era war flag. One former lifter told PowerliftingWomen that Farrant he called his lifting group the “Fourth Reich.” Farrant has claimed that A.B.S is the Ireland hub of SBD Apparel, one of the biggest weightlifting apparel companies in the world, though a rep for SBD told Deadspin that Farrant is simply a “retailer.” The rep said there is “no room within the company for any tolerance of fascism or racism,” and they will be conducting an investigation.


PowerliftingWomen got in touch with IPF vice president Rob Burke, who said that while Farrant “has some pretty eccentric views and believes some things that, frankly, I find hard to empathize with,” he was actually a good guy who trains people of all races and backgrounds (A.B.S. does tout their diversity.) When pressed, Burke admitted that Farrant has consumed “a lot of information about what happened in Germany from ‘33–‘45 from sources that I wouldn’t necessarily give much credence to.”




PowerliftingWomen told Deadspin that people close to Farrant have vociferously defended him as a nice coach who is just “being provocative.” One lifter said, “He’s a prick, but he’s a good human being.” Burke and a few others attempted to explain Farrant’s beliefs as a product of a hard childhood followed up by service in Germany with the British army.

In general, the person running PowerliftingWomen said, the community has been supportive of their efforts to drive white supremacists out of the sport, though there is a highly vocal “20 percent” who’ve acutely resisted any attempts at policing the community, as well as a sect of people who will vigorously defend anyone they know personally. The person said they knew it would be like this: “When we posted a woman’s account of her coach drugging and raping her we were attacked on all sides and no one else in powerlifting stepped up to support her or us. So we expect it now.”


I reached out to Farrant to ask him what he thought went down in Germany from 1933-1945. He replied with this: