Doddering

Shaking, infirm from old age (adj.)

The homosexual weightlifter had been hated in Austria since he first burst out on the weightlifting scene when he was sixteen. No one else in the circuit, the judges, audience, novices, other competitors knew his sexual orientation when he first competed at Innsbrook, but shortly after he beat the reigning champion by several hundred kilos, there were interviewers demanding answers to questions for their articles for the sports sections of the papers. He had no agent. No manager. He had been training by himself on his father's backyard farm in a small mountain town all his life, he had no knowledge of the workings of the city--only muscles and naievete.
When the newspaper men crowded around him they asked about his past. Where was he from? How did he get so strong? Did he have a family?
He told all: proscribed from his father's house when caught with his lover, a man from a neighboring farm, he found an advertisement for the weightlifting competition. He had been sleeping on the street for the past several nights.
The reporters wrote busily as he told his succinct history. His knees began to shake for the first time when he saw the expressions on their faces as they wrotes and whispered to one another. Standing there, watching these men look at each other and pointing at him, his knees began to tremble as if there were some great weight upon them.

Over the years the weightlifting circuit became his life. He had no family and not many friends. The homosexual weightlifter lived hotel to hotel and competed in many tournaments, finding a modicum of solace in the activity he had trained for and mastered throughout his lonelylife. But despite his many victories, they were not counted as such. He could beat any lifter at any match, but the judges subtracted hundreds of kilos from his score because of what he told the newspapers. Because of who he was.
Weightlifting in Vienna became a popular spectator sport because of him. On the circuit, he became an absurd institution, part of a ritual that many paid to partake in, where the homosexual weightlifter lifted as much as he could in front of the whispering crowd, his old knees shaking horribly but withstanding the greatest of weights. He was given last place every time. No matter how much he lifted. It was part of the ritual. And the crowd, smiling, would boo him and throw things at him while he stood there, a doddering old man with knees trembling beneath the weights.