The Famous Telnyashka

March 11, 2019

Rigert is said to have inspired the sport’s governing body to change their rule requiring a uniform of a single color so that he could wear the striped t-shirt on the platform.

Soviet weightlifter David Rigert was famous for his signature telnyashka, the blue and white striped t-shirt.

Originally part of the Russian naval uniform in Czarist times, the telnyashka got associated with valor in Soviet art through propaganda about the Kronshtadt sailors in the October Revolution, naval infantry who defended Leningrad, and petty officer-turned-sniper Vassili Zaitsev, hero of Jude Law’s Enemy at the Gates.

“Death to the bourgeoisie!” The legendary Kronshtadt sailors.
Wartime propagandists seemed to LOVE pictures of Soviet sailors looking badass with cartridge belts.
This lucky swabby from the Northern Fleet has an SVT rifle.

After the striped jerseys became cool, the Soviet airborne corps wore them too. But Rigert wasn’t in the airborne either.

But it turns out Rigert had nothing to do with the navy. He got his famous telnyashka through a misunderstanding.

In 1972, when Rigert traveled to a meet in the Romanian port city of Constanta, he met a group of sailors who mistook him for a fellow navy man. It seems they had seen a picture of him wearing a telnyashka and assumed that he’d done his mandatory military service in the navy, like them, so they proudly presented their honorary shipmate with a sailor’s telnyashka. Rigert had to disappoint his seagoing fans with the truth–he’d actually served in an army radar unit–but accepted their gift with gratitude and promised that he would wear it in competition for them.

Two months after getting the magical telnyashka, Rigert pressed a world record 198kg / 436 lbs., representing 220% of his bodyweight. I’d be overjoyed if I could **squat** that much raw.

Rigert dominated that meet and wore the jersey again at major meets in the early 1970s, as he cemented his reputation. Soon it became part of his public image.

Most memorably, he was wearing the telnyashka at the Munich Olympics, when he set an Olympic record in the press only to “bomb out” in the snatch. At least outside the USSR, those pictures from Munich–the triumph in the press, the disaster in the snatch–probably did more than anything to make the telnyashka his signature uniform.