2005 Ad

Muscle & Fitness, June, 2005 by Jeff O'Connell

CERTAIN COUNTRIES HAVE EARNED reputations for certain things. For example, a used jock strap would be hailed as haute couture if the label said, "Made in France." Subtitle White Chicks in Italian and incoherent drivel becomes Fellini-esque. And any training technique or apparatus worth a damn must have been developed in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, within secret compounds lorded over by Bond-villain types wearing black turtlenecks.

One might assume, then, that Alexander Fedorov would have enjoyed the advantage of training according to revolutionary principles in facilities far superior to those of his Western counterparts. After all, some bodybuilding aficionados see him as The Next Huge Thing, perhaps even a Mr. Olympia-in-waiting, pointing to the 2003 Grand Prix of Russia as proof. Competing there as an amateur, Alexander pushed Ronnie Coleman and Jay Cutler hard before finishing third.

In reality, the 27-year-old would settle for a portable space heater shipped over from Best Buy. Alexander trains in a "gym" that's nothing more than dreary cement and 90-degree angles--vintage Stalinist architecture--and a broken-down heating system, discreetly situated in a cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Anyone for dead-lifts?) It gets so cold there in the winter months that the graveyard's horizontal residents likely yearn for weekend junkets to hell.

When you think about it, there is no grand tradition of Russian bodybuilding dating back to the Soviet era, to put it mildly. Scan IFBB pro scorecards from the 1990s, and every now and then a Russian-sounding name will stick out in the lower teens like Mikhail Gorbachev's head splotch. Who can forget Alexander Vishnevsky, Eugeny Vishin, Sergei Otroch, Oleg Zhur? (The latter two are from Ukraine, but it was formerly part of the USSR.) Each was no doubt an excellent bodybuilder to have gotten as far as he did, but none would ever strike fear into the hearts of men, as they say.

MAUSOLEUM OF MUSCLE

The reason why Russia has little history of world-class bodybuilding--and that's an important qualifier, because lifting weights is popular there--is the same reason Alexander trains in a graveyard. According to the opaque logic of Soviet bureaucracy, Olympic weightlifting was revered, but it was nyet! to bodybuilding. Still, upon leaving the Soviet army in his early 20s, Alexander's father wanted to pursue the latter when he wasn't driving a bus to support his family. So he found an abandoned building in a cemetery and began handcrafting weights to fill it, augmenting his array with the occasional discarded exercise machine.

For years, nobody knew about the gym except for the handful of like-minded men who trained there in what amounted to a secret society of muscle. (The cemetery's administrators looked the other way.) Alexander eventually followed his father there and turned out to be a born bodybuilder. Both men train there together to this day. "It's the best gym for me," says Alexander, speaking by phone from his home in St. Petersburg through his manager, Mikhail Gouliayev. "It's not a gym built for making money. It's a gym built by bodybuilders for bodybuilding. It includes everything I need for my training as a competitor."

Apparently so. In 1997, at age 19, Alexander debuted by winning the junior division at the German Open Championships, and the following year he placed first in his class at the 1998 Junior World Championships. In 1999, however, he was disqualified from amateur bodybuilding for more than a year because he failed a drug test at the European Championships. Devastated at what he felt were misleading results and the subsequent suspension, Alexander stopped training altogether for nearly two years.

In April 2002, an organizer of the Russian Bodybuilding and Fitness League approached Alexander with an offer he couldn't refuse. Compete at the 2003 European Championships, scheduled to be held a year later in St. Petersburg, he said, and I'll help you financially over the coming year. Alexander not only competed, he won the overall and earned the right to turn pro. Wanting to compete in several Russian contests as an amateur at the end of 2003, he held off. Meanwhile, thanks to a special invite, Alexander gave Ronnie and Jay their St. Petersburg scare in November of that year. He finished second to Ronnie at the same show in 2004.

THE STAGE IS SET

Alexander is now a pro athlete, with sponsorship (Universal Nutrition), an English-speaking manager and a wife, Natalia. Contest-wise, he's focused on getting his health squared away for the upcoming Mr. Olympia--namely, rehabbing a torn pectoral muscle that had to be surgically repaired. It will be his first U.S. contest, but he has no plans to move Stateside. "If I ever moved to the United States, I would have to take with me half of the St. Petersburg population," says Alexander, laughing. "I have a lot of relatives and friends here. I'm not sure if the U.S. is ready to welcome them.

"Seriously, though, why do I have to move to the United States if I can be a successful bodybuilder here in Russia? It's a modern world. It doesn't matter where you live or what language you speak," he points out.