Only I know what's wrong with bodybuilding today!

I found this video on YouTube a while back and it blew my mind for many reasons.

It brought to mind several points I've had about bodybuilding as a spectator sport for a long time.

1) Female bodybuilding is generally more interesting to watch than male bodybuilding, because of costumes, panache and so on.

2) Bodybuilding in many foreign countries is more interesting to watch than the totally dead and lifeless North American stage, because they supplement their routines with non-flexing, displays of athleticism, dance and gymnastics. Also, the choices of music are more interesting in foreign countries. It blew my mind to see Asian bodybuilders flex to classical music as opposed to Iron Maiden. And bodybuilders from Russia like Denis Sergovisky also double as acrobats with state-sponsored circus and athletic training.

The problem as I see it, with bodybuilding is this: it's booooooooring.

For my American readers, remember the Superbowl a few years ago? It featured the undefeated New England Patriots, a team that got off Scott-free when accused of cheating, the most hated team in sports since the heyday of the Oakland Raiders. The unvanquished Patriots played against an underdog team. And not to spoil it for everyone, but the underdogs beat 'em while the whole country cheered.

That's what's missing from bodybuilding today: unpredictability. This is why people just don't care about bodybuilding.

At the Mr. Olympia this year, I rooted for the underdog Kai Greene. I always thought he was the best looking heavyweight, and a bit of a nut, a real genius eccentric with a lot of likability. But he wasn't going to win ever, so what's the point of my rooting for him? What's the point in even following? Yawn.

A while back I wrote about how in the early 1990s MacMahon created the World Bodybuilding Federation because bodybuilding itself was unbelievably dull and a lot of people were just not happy. What blows my mind is how nothing really changed in 20 years, and attendance crowds for bodybuilding events are dwindling. Don't quote me on this but I strongly suspect that female bodybuilding will evaporate in at least a decade because it has all the problems of a hard to take seriously woman's sport mixed with the problems of bodybuilding. This is a gut-level intuition, but I strongly suspect figure classes are being introduced to eventually replace true female bodybuilders.

When was the last time that a nobody came from nowhere and won a bodybuilding championship? Bob Paris comes to mind - I understand he was homeless at the time of his first victory at 24 years old. Perhaps Finland's Kike Elomaa (remember her? Yeah, I don't either...though she beat Rachel McLish and I understand is something of an object of a cult in her native Finland).

The problem is there's no drama in many ways to bodybuilding contests because it's based on hard work on the run-up to a contest. Bodybuilding contests are often decided weeks before the fact, since it takes years and years, possibly decades, to develop a contest-worthy, winning body. Someone that couldn't win one year is unlikely to win the year afterward because the pace of gaining mass and proportions is so damn slow.

In many ways, bodybuilding reminds me a little of poetry, in the sense that more people write poetry than read and publish it. Most people who follow bodybuilding want to be bodybuilders themselves or work in the fitness industry in some way. I remember an interview with Theodore Sturgeon where he complained about getting fan mail from people wanting advice as aspiring young science fiction writers.

"I don't have any fans. Just 700 people that want my job."

Finally, the last factor that makes bodybuilding hard to take an interest in the fact it's a judged sport and therefore has all the subjectivity problems of judged sports like figure skating. Except even in figure skating there's at least some excitement because of the possibility of someone tripping.

Take a bicep that comes to a point or a peak. This is a genetic thing, and some have it and others don't. Would that add points or subtract? It depends on the judge's definition of the ideal male body.

And then there's the corruption and the role the Weiders play in defining the sport. Every sport has its share of laughable corruption and rigging, from Major League Baseball to the notoriously crooked FIFA, but that's made all the more outrageous and enraging because of the subjectivity and lack of transparency in bodybuilding judging. Cory Everson is a great athlete, beautiful woman and ambassador for the sport, but she won all those times because she was in the Weider's back pocket. No one, realistically, was ever going to beat her for that reason. Then there's the famous and slimy story about how in 1980 the great Serge Nubret was denied his one great chance at the championship over a puffy Schwarzenegger that had looked better and wasn't really prepared.

Finally, I've made the argument before so I won't repeat it in full here, but because bodybuilding has become a niche market, it's started to speak its own language and no longer relates to the greater world. You can see that with magazines like Muscular Development which are all about wink-wink non-endorsement endorsement of juicing. In the beginning, bodybuilding was about having an ideal male body that even outsiders would admire. Something went seriously wrong when it became all about mass as opposed to proportionality, which scares people off (like women - imagine that, right?).

If Ron Coleman's bloated pregnant belly build is what's wrong with male bodybuilding, the problem is a billion times worse with the women. If male bodies that are blocky and massive as opposed to Steve Reeves-esque sleek and attractive are not that great on men, it's much worse with women. I have no idea why Pumping Iron II: the Women isn't more commercially available because it's a documentary that shows the exact moment that women's bodybuilding took a wrong turn. Bev Francis, who came from a powerlifting background, set the worst of all female bodybuilding precedents by being a mass monster, when no woman bodybuilder had ever been that big before. She made sheer size more important than aesthetics and women's bodybuilding has never entirely recovered.

At the end of the day, bodybuilding is about aesthetics as opposed to sheer size, about the ideal male and female body. And in the case of women, the ideal body can't necessarily be confused with size.

(Incidentally, I fully expect most of the responses to take exception to this point as opposed to my saying bodybuilding is boring to follow, because that's pretty much inarguable.)

The bottom line is that if a sport is dull people won't follow and it won't be any more than just a niche. MMA fans, I hate to say this, but your sport will never get a wider audience because it's just plain dull. MMA emerged from full-contact kickboxing, which came out of the dissatisfaction a lot of Martial Artists had with traditional contest judging, which valued form over power and effectiveness. So they married a lot of Eastern martial arts training to Western techniques like boxing footwork and weight training. But the end result of this is just dull to watch because, like most real fistfights, MMA fights tend to end on the ground in a grappling match where nothing moves that resembles nothing more than really bad gay porn. Thirty seconds of explosive movement followed by 15 minutes where you might as well just get up and go to the concession stand.

Bodybuilders in Good Korea

One thing that's always interested me is how muscle revues in other countries involve a lot of state-trained athletes who have a lot of skill with agility, flexibility, acrobatics and dance...witness the Las Vegas beefcake show that featured Russian muscle hunk Denis Sergovisky that showed a lot more than just the usual bump and grind but also had tumbling and other displays of astonishing athleticism.



One thing that's always fascinated me is the view of bodybuilding and body image in other parts of the world, and this great vid of a pair of bodybuilders on a variety show in "Good Korea" is absolutely fascinating and sexy, and a direction the sport of bodybuilding should go: bodies as living artwork, to the point their very movements become a thing a beauty indistinguishable from dance, combined with displays of athleticism, agility and strength.

I say all this despite the fact the kitschy production makes Sabado Gigante look like a paragon of dignity and restraint, and the bright colors and loud pop-up text gave me a gigantic migraine after watching it for more than five minutes. Despite all of this, I don't think I've ever seen muscular physiques presented quite so attractively as here. The uninteresting to watch "slab of meat" bodybuilding competitions have a lot to answer for.

It's easy to look at the Koreans as less sophisticated than us in the West because they're obviously blown away by muscles of any kind, ooohing and ahhhing over the muscled couple. But I doubt a reaction on a Western series would be any different, either. Comic books aside, we're just no more used to huge physiques than the Good Koreans are. Come to think of it, even Beowulf's CGI bod was pretty subdued compared to those of the sixties real-life musclemen, and in 1949, Steve Reeves was refused the part of Samson in Samson and Delilah because he was so big the audience just wasn't used to his kind of bod.

One of the more interesting moments (in addition to a neat leverage trick shown near the end) is when they ask our male bodybuilder to slip a piece of paper and grip it between his pecs. Audience members, particularly female ones, looked on in fascination and what was funniest to me (blink and you miss it!) was one older sister or mother who tried to cover the eyes of the young teen next to her when our guy did his feat of strength! It reminds me of why 19th Century carnival strongmen started to wear their distinctive posing costumes, as it was believed the sight of flexing male bodies might cause women viewers to faint.

An interesting comparison picture

I found this absolutely remarkable photoshop job that compares Arnold and Ron Coleman at their primes.

It's easy to think, "hey, maybe they took one of the best Arnold pics and matched it against the worst of Coleman's and make Ron look bad," right? Actually, the Coleman pic was taken from the 2000 Mr. Olympia, which incidentally, he won.

It just goes to show there's been a transformation in the aesthetics of the bodybuilding world, and it rhymes with "steroids!"

To be as clear as possible: the problem isn't just bad pharmacology, because chemicals have always played a role in bodybuilding and sports. Rather, the problem is how they've transformed the exercise patterns of bodybuilders, how they've gone from a supplementary role to the centerpiece of training. Previously, bodybuilders trained year-round. Now, bodybuilders train for several weeks prior to a competition and pump their bods full of chemicals. The winner isn't the person that's trained the hardest, but the guy with the genetics to blow up like a sponge in a few weeks with heavy training.

The problem isn't just steroids, but how bodybuilding has totally deviated from ideals of health and beauty and has started to speak its own language. Mass and training have become ends in and of itself, and the press (notably the mysoginistic, homophobic IRONMAN) have become so insular. Because of the development of bodybuilding as a niche subculture that speaks its own language, there's an extreme lack of introspection. Nobody ever tells these guys, "y'know, your thighs look like a bagful of cats." A generation or two ago, bodybuilders produced movie stars like Steve Reeves and Lou Ferrigno; it'd be impossible to do this today.

The net result of all this is an unwholesome, bloated, somewhat grotesque appearance with big roid guts. For heaven's sake, look at Ron's calves and compare them to Arnold's: they look like a bag stuffed full of cats.

What happened to the idea of bodybuilding promoting a physically healthy, attractive ideal male body? Ron, the winner of the Mr. Olympia and thus the poster boy for the entire culture, has an unattractive body with an emphasis on mass alone, trained and bloated by pharmacology with a build that is something like the human evolutionary equivalent of a peacock's tail, without the peacock's tail's attractiveness.

It's worth noting the only truly good looking bodybuilding men are the naturals: Konstantin Ruzanov, Ulisses Jr., Denis Sergovisky, Mike O'Hearn.

Bob Paris

If they're ever going to do a schmaltzy, triumphant sports movie about bodybuilding, there'd be no better story than that of the devastatingly handsome Bob Paris. He was a homeless teenager that emerged from absolutely nowhere to win the Mr. Olympia at age 23.

Alas, ladies, Bob Paris is one of the few openly gay bodybuilders...as in actually gay, instead of having a gay-for-pay biz on the side to keep them in soy powder and Brazilian horse steroids. Bob Paris fights for civil rights and dignity for homosexuals, which is admirable and makes him one of those "role model" types that "overcome adversity," like Colin Powell and so forth.

There are a few openly gay bodybuilders, natch. Most of them work for Cher.

European Musclemagazine Covers

Have you ever noticed that European muscle magazines are more likely to sex up their magazine covers? With some, I can't tell if it's a fitness journal or a beefcake pictorial.

I guess it's because, for some reason, Italian muscle mags are more likely to have dark Mediterranean, Italian men. (I wonder why...)

When I was a post-pubescent girl, I didn't go for Tiger Beat, I went for the muscle man mags (at least when I wasn't accompanied by someone and I quickly checked to see that no one in the store was looking). This was in the mid-to-early nineties when the handsome Mike O'Hearn was required by law to be on every single magazine cover.

One of the great regrets of American bodybuilding mags is the gradual transformation of MUSCLEMAG into the magazine of choice for douchey, homophobic jocks whose pictorials center on unaesthetic, somewhat grotesque guys that remind me less of Adonis or Hercules, but the "Gammas" from Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD. I'm not so much offended by their "wink, wink" subtle endorsement of full time juicing, the insane hardcore "gruntgruntbulgeBIGGERharder" mentality, or the fact it's homophobia and misogyny (strange how the two go together!) became so ruthlessly overt it could actually be called an editorial position.

Rather, I'm offended by their cancellation of the Max Rep comic strip! Good luck getting anything like that today into the dead serious Musclemag. It was the funniest comic strip of all time to people that like jokes about soy powder.

In many ways, European muscle mags are something of a throwback to the days when the purpose of the muscle mag wasn't just to give exercise tips, but to sell a lifestyle with photogenic and handsome male bodybuilders with sensual and perfect bodies that were usually clutched adoringly by submissive women.

In fact, it's interesting to speculate how early physique magazines functioned as a kind of early, unannounced gay porn.

In fact, visit this website for a GREAT collection of vintage physique magazine covers.