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.
