Fedail Güler

Fedail Güler — Biography

Fedail Güler was born in 1972 in Bulgaria to a Turkish family. He took up weightlifting in 1986 and became a Turkish international in the 70 kg lightweight class. As a junior he won the 1991 World Junior Championships in Wolmirstedt, Germany, and the 1992 European Junior Championships in Cardiff.

His peak came at the 1994 World Weightlifting Championships in Istanbul, where he lifted 160 kg in the snatch, 190 kg in the clean and jerk and 350 kg in total, taking the gold medal and a world record. The same year he took silver at the European Championships. In 1995 he won European gold in Warsaw and world silver in Guangzhou. He competed for Turkey at the 1996 Summer Olympics.

After retiring from competition he worked as an advisor at the Turkish Ministry of Youth and Sports. He is counted among the golden generation of Turkish weightlifting in the 1990s alongside Naim Süleymanoğlu and Halil Mutlu. In 2019, together with open-water swimmer Petar Stoychev, he was granted honorary citizenship of Momchilgrad in Bulgaria.