Police, Fire Games to Be Close to Home

Fairfax County Will Host World Competition in 2015

However easygoing his grin, Jim Pope is not a man to mess with. The 20-year veteran of the Fairfax County Sheriff's Department weighs 325 pounds, works out at a gym in three-hour increments and recently broke four world weightlifting records at an athletic competition second only to the Summer Olympics in size.

"I can still compete with the kids," said Pope, a Loudoun County resident and master deputy sheriff who started lifting weights in high school.

Pope, 50, made his mark at the World Police and Fire Games, a 10-day event for first responders that, organizers announced recently, Fairfax County will host in 2015.

Held every other year since 1985, the games feature about 65 sports. They include traditional favorites, such as track and field and basketball, and career-specific ones, such as police dog explosives and narcotics detection.

The 2009 games, hosted by Vancouver, British Columbia, early this month, attracted more than 10,500 competitors, nearly twice the number of athletes and officials expected for the 2010 Winter Olympics, also in Vancouver.

Despite the competition's size, Pope had never heard of it until a committee toured Fairfax in 2006, during the county's first bid to be a host city. The county lost to Belfast for the 2013 games.

Having competed as an amateur weightlifter since 1988, Pope was intrigued enough to fly to Australia for the 2007 games. There, he won a silver medal in the bench press and a gold in the push/pull event, which combines the bench press with a dead lift.

Videos posted online from this year's event show Pope's record-breaking efforts in a hotel ballroom before a crowd of cheering onlookers. He bench-pressed 418 pounds Aug. 5, demolishing the old record of 352 pounds and winning a gold medal. Three days later, he won a second gold and broke other records when he lifted a combined 1,127.5 pounds in the push-pull.

"I don't go to beat somebody else; I go to compete against myself," said Pope, who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes four years ago and continues exercising, at least in part, to "keep one foot out of the grave."

Competitors pay for their airfare and lodging, and the costs have limited the number of local participants in the Police and Fire World Games, said 2nd Lt. Bruce Blechl of Fairfax County police.

"There are only a handful who attend" from the county's police, fire and sheriff's departments, said Blechl, a runner who has been competing in the games' cross-country events since 1997. "For the size we have and the reputation we have, I thought we were underrepresented at these games."

That might change when the games are here in 2015, said Blechl, executive director of Team Fairfax, a nonprofit group established in 2005 to bring the games to the county.