Egmond Molina Pulled a 21,737-Pound Bus With His Neck for His Tenth Guinness Record and He Calls It Engineering

Egmond Molina is 49 years old, weighs 87 kilograms, and has just dragged a 21,737-pound bus across 20 meters of asphalt using only his neck. That sentence should not parse. The bus weighs 9,860 kilograms, which is roughly 113 of him stacked end to end, and the previous record sat at 17,769 pounds, set by Ukrainian strongman Dmytro Hrunskyi in 2024. Molina, who calls himself the Human Crane, beat that mark by nearly two tons. It is now his tenth Guinness World Records title.

The pull happened on January 9, 2026, on his home island of Aruba, but Guinness only confirmed the record this week. The footage is doing the rounds because it looks fake. A man in a harness, a thick strap looped around the back of his neck, an enormous yellow bus, and the bus is moving. Twenty meters in, it stops. He stops. Everyone exhales.

Ten records, one neck, four kids named after biblical patriarchs

The neck pull is impressive in isolation. In context, it is the punctuation at the end of a very strange sentence. Molina holds Guinness titles for the heaviest weight supported with the mouth on parallel bars (90.3 kilograms), the heaviest deadlift with one finger (159 kilograms), the fastest 20-meter bus pull with a single finger (33.32 seconds), and the heaviest platform lift using a hip belt (1,002 kilograms, which is one metric ton plus a small tip). He also holds the record for fastest 20-meter tram pull with his teeth, and the fastest with one finger. There are internet hoaxes that make less sense than this man’s resume.

Two of his records sit in a different category entirely. He holds the title for most crown cap bottles opened in 30 seconds, which is six. And the fastest hot water bottle burst, which he did in 2.87 seconds. We have respect for the bus pull. We have questions about the bottle opener. Why six? Why 30 seconds? Why did he look at a hot water bottle and decide it had insulted his family?

His four children are named Nigel, Egmond Junior, Benjamin, and Adelinda. He told Guinness his mission is to leave them and the youth of Aruba a legacy of discipline. We assume Nigel does not have to do the bottle thing.

Wolff’s Law and the engineering of a human winch

The interesting part is not the spectacle, it is the method. Molina describes his training as an engineering process. He cites Wolff’s Law, the 19th-century observation that bone remodels itself in response to mechanical load. Stress a bone consistently in a specific direction and it grows denser along the lines of force, the way a tree thickens on the windward side. Molina has been treating his cervical spine the way a cyclist treats a femur.

This is not standard strongman talk. Most heavy-pull athletes train explosive power, posterior chain, and grip. Molina is training bone density. The implication is that he sees his neck as a structural element, not a muscle group. When you pull a 21,737-pound vehicle by your spine, the muscles only get you started. After the first inch, what is holding the weight is the column itself, vertebrae stacked into a load path that ends at his hips and feet. He has spent decades teaching his skeleton to be a chassis.

Cats do something rhyming, on a much smaller scale. A house cat can hang from a curtain rod by its forepaws, swing for several seconds, and drop without injury, because cat skeletons are extraordinarily lightweight relative to the muscle attached. Molina is not a cat. But he has reverse-engineered what a cat does naturally, which is treat the bony frame as a tunable parameter.

The serial-record-holder is its own genre

Most Guinness records die in the obscure middle of the book. They are nouns, not careers. The serial holder is a different animal. Ashrita Furman has more than 200 records. Suresh Joachim has over 60. These are not strongmen, they are completists. The category itself is not strength, it is willingness, and the willingness of a serial holder is closer to monastic devotion than to athletic ambition. Chonkers the 2,000-pound sea lion became famous for showing up. Molina became famous for not stopping.

Ten records is the threshold where the holder stops being a person who did one weird thing and starts being a person whose entire identity is doing weird things on purpose. The hot water bottle and the bus belong to the same project. Both are statements that the body is a tool and the world is full of objects waiting to be moved by it.

Why an island of 106,000 keeps producing strongmen

Aruba has a population of about 106,000 people. The island is 32 kilometers long. By any reasonable per-capita metric, it is overrepresented in extreme strength sports. Molina is not the only Aruban strongman, he is just the most decorated. The local press has been covering his records for over a decade, and his pulls have become something between a sporting event and a civic ritual. Banks of these absurd cultural artifacts accumulate in small places, the way Italy stacks 500,000 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano in a vault and calls it loan collateral. Aruba stacks Egmond Molina records.

The bus he pulled was not a prop, it was a working vehicle. Reports suggest he intends to push for the heaviest neck-pull ever logged before he hits 50. Given that he beat the prior record by almost two tons on his own first attempt at this category, the ceiling is unclear. So is the floor of human cervical engineering. Molina seems committed to finding both.

What we are watching for

Three things make this story stick. First, the visual: a man, a strap, a bus, and 20 meters of evidence. Second, the catalog: ten records that span genuine athletic achievement and genuinely unhinged choices, with no hierarchy between them in his own description of his career. Third, the framing: he calls it engineering. He thinks he is a structure under load, and the data agrees with him.

The Pudgy Cat take is that the most interesting Guinness record is never the one in the headline. It is the second one down the list, the one that reveals the person’s actual personality. Molina pulled a bus with his neck. Then we noticed he had also burst a hot water bottle in under three seconds. The neck got him on television. The bottle is what tells you who he is.