British Columbia's most colourful sporting hero and a former World's Strongest Man, Doug Hepburn, has died at the age of 74.

The Vancouver athlete was born with a club foot and withered leg but managed to overcome his physical limitations to become a champion weightlifter.

Hepburn came across bodybuilding in a magazine at 14, and told his mother, Someday I am going to become the strongest man in the world.

In 1953, he made that dream come true by winning the world weightlifting championship in Stockholm, Sweden. Hepburn won a gold medal at the British Empire Games in Vancouver a year later.

But he was known for more than his bodybuilding. Hepburn was a renaissance man, trying his hand at several occupations that included poet, inventor, dietitian, cabaret singer and rambling storefront philosopher.

One friend, Lorne Ace Atkinson, remembers Hepburn coming into his bicycle shop years before he achieved fame.

Somebody left a big 110-pound anvil in my store and he was all the time trying to lift this over his head, Atkinson said in a report from The Canadian Press. He was quite strong.

Atkinson, who visited Hepburn occassionally, said the weightlifter was very health conscious. The last time I visited him was earlier this year and he says, 'This will keep you going' and he gave me a bag full of green tea and some of that Swedish hard tack, he said.

The details of Hepburn's death have not been released.