Geoff Capes, a herculean wonder from the English countryside who, in addition to winning the World’s Strongest Man competition twice, was a champion breeder of parakeets, an activity that provided an escape from stunts like bending steel bars around his neck, died on Oct. 23 in Lincoln, England, in the East Midlands. He was 75.
The death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Lewis Capes, who did not specify a cause.
At 6-foot-6 and 365 pounds, Mr. Capes was a crushing Adonis whose daily diet consisted of seven pints of milk, two loaves of bread, a dozen eggs, two steaks, a jar of baked beans, two tins of sardines, a pound of butter and a leg of lamb.
His gargantuan caloric intake powered his extraordinary feats in strongman competitions: pulling 12-ton trucks uphill, flipping cars, tearing London phone books in half and tossing five-pound bricks as if they were Kleenex boxes. He could run 200 meters — nearly the length of two American football fields — in under 25 seconds.
“When you saw him sprint, you realized just what an absolutely terrifying athlete he was, as in terrifyingly good,” Colin Bryce, a television commentator for the World’s Strongest Man competition, said in an interview. “He wasn’t just a big lump.”
Mr. Capes won the World’s Strongest Man title in 1983 and 1985. He won the U.K. Truck-Pulling Championship in 1986. And he was a six-time champion of the World Highland Games, a competition of traditional Scottish sports during which participants wear kilts while throwing heavy objects, including telegraph poles.
His physical prowess made him a favorite of Queen Elizabeth II, who howled in laughter after her glove stuck to his sweaty, sticky hands when she congratulated him on winning the Braemar Games, another Scottish skills competition, in 1982. Prince Charles and Princess Diana stood nearby having a giggle.
For many years, Mr. Capes was England’s most famous athlete. Television news reporters marveled at his diet and his muscular triumphs, including his simple method for changing flat tires — lifting the car with one hand while putting the spare on with the other.
Mr. Capes appeared in numerous commercials, including one for the Volkswagen Polo, in which he flips over the tiny car to examine its underbelly as a voice-over says, “You don’t have to be the richest or strongest man in the world to pick up a Polo.”
Children played a simulated version of him in the computer game “Geoff Capes Strong Man.” And in the 1980s he was a familiar sight on Christmas Day, when the World’s Strongest Man competition aired on television after the queen’s address to the nation.
“I don’t think you can stress quite how much fame Geoff had because you couldn’t ever recreate it in the modern era,” Mr. Bryce said. “Unless you were in America, where you were like an N.F.L. star and you became a true household name. Geoff was a true household name in Britain.”
Mr. Capes got his start in competitive sports as a shot putter. He won 17 national titles and was the European indoor champion in 1974 and 1976. He competed in three Olympics (1972, 1976 and 1980), finishing as high as fifth place in 1980.
He supported himself and his young family by working as a police officer. One afternoon, he was sent to arrest a man for not paying a fine. He knocked on his door. When the man opened it, Mr. Capes saw dozens of budgerigars — a type of parakeet — chirping about in cages.
“Could I have a look at your birds?” Mr. Capes said.
They brought back memories his childhood, when he tended to injured birds and animals. The man invited him inside and served him a cup of tea. They had a lovely chat about the tiny, chatty budgies. Mr. Capes even held some of them in his giant hands.
Alas, after an hour, Mr. Capes reminded the man that he was there to arrest him.
“He came quietly and afterwards we kept in touch,” Mr. Capes told The Sunday People, a London newspaper, in 1998. “Two weeks later he gave me my first ever pair of breeding budgies.”
Mr. Capes began breeding them with the same enthusiasm with which he trained for strongman competitions. He competed in budgerigar shows throughout Europe, winning a world championship in 1995. He was named president of the Budgerigar Society in 2008 and frequently judged competitions.
“There’s something about their color and beauty that fascinates me,” Mr. Capes told The Sunday People. “They bring out my gentler side.”
Geoffrey Lewis Capes weighed 12 pounds, 7 ounces when he was born on Aug. 23, 1949, in Holbeach, an agricultural town in Lincolnshire, England. His father, Bill Capes, was a land worker. His mother, Eileen (Alcock) Capes, was a matron at a care home who stood six feet tall and weighed 250 pounds.
“The family wasn’t just working class,” Mr. Capes was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph, “but was on the lowest rung of that very long ladder that is the English class system.”
Growing up, he recalled, he was “always in fights.”
“If the next town came down on a Friday and there were only eight or nine of them, I’d say, ‘Go back and get some more,’” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2023. “I’d fight them on my own. I was quite quiet but there was an inner aggression.”
He left school at 14 and became a laborer, hauling sacks of potatoes and picking up other odd jobs. He also joined a local athletic club, where he met Stuart Storey, a hurdler who would later compete in the 1968 Olympics.
“I was a problem child with challenging behavior, and he rescued me from this, put me straight and guided me through the early days,” Mr. Capes told the British magazine Athletics Weekly in 2015.
Mr. Storey encouraged him to throw the shot put and enter competitions. Unable to afford decent clothing, Mr. Capes traveled to events wearing garments that his mother’s patients left behind when they died.
He joined the local police department in 1969 and served as a patrol officer for two years before switching to a position teaching calisthenics to new recruits.
Mr. Capes’s marriage in 1970 to Gillian Fox ended in divorce. He married Kashmiro Bhatti in 2018. She survives him. In addition to his son, he is also survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Emma Capes, and six grandchildren.
At the height of his breeding career, Mr. Capes owned more than 300 budgies. He had built them a small wooden aviary behind his home and cooked for them every morning.
“It’s my own special recipe consisting of boiled eggs, mashed carrots and a few other secret ingredients that I’m not prepared to divulge,” he told The Sunday People. “I mash it all up into a sort of porridge.”
The birds devoured it.
“It gives them everything they need,” he said, “for shiny plumage, healthy bones and strong beaks.”
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