Big time: Ronnie Coleman is bigger than ever, and so is the Olympia

Flex, Jan, 2005 by Shawn Perine

"Back double biceps." The gauntlet was thrown. The game was on. Halfway through the evening finals of the 2004 Mr. Olympia competition, Gunter Schlierkamp challenged Markus Ruhl to match him in a pose of his own choosing, and bodybuilding history was made in the process. Whatever happened from this point on, one thing was sure: there would be no turning back.

ALE TO THE CHIEF| When Joe Weider created the Mr. Olympia in 1965, it was out of a need to solidify the sport's competitive season, which was then akin to a Christmas tree without a star on top. Titles such as Mr. World and Mr. Universe capped its various branches as penultimate achievements, separate but arguably equal. Yet there was not one single title to signify that an athlete had reached the apex of the sport. At the time, several men could make the case that they were bodybuilding's top dog: Larry Scott on the West Coast, Harold Poole on the East Coast and Earl Maynard from across the Atlantic. Without the three ever going head-to-head in one contest, the point was moot.

The story goes that one day, while warming up over a cold beer with Weider, Scott, who held the Mr. America and the Mr. Universe titles, lamented the prospect of having to find a job, for lack of further heights to climb in bodybuilding. Bodybuilding competition didn't exactly pay the bills as it was. Most landlords didn't accept alloy trophies as a form of payment.

As he listened to his friend's tale of woe, the Master Blaster had an epiphany. Why not create a contest that would give the top titleholders a chance to duke it out, with the winner earning indisputable recognition as the world's number-one bodybuilder?

Ever the marketing genius, Joe Weider soon realized that the answer, in the guise of a beer called Olympia, was right under his nose, literally.

HARD ROAD TO PRO| In 1965, some 2,200 fans packed the seats at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to witness the first Olympia. They were merely the tip of the iceberg. The event quickly turned into a standing-room-only affair. As the legend goes, crowds shut out at the box office swarmed the sidewalk in front of the theater. What was more or less an insider's event, promoted by scant mention in a couple of Weider magazines and by word of mouth, turned into a smashing success.

It was a simple formula really. Gather the best of the best in bodybuilding--men who made other men envious and women swoon--and pit them against one another in a battle royal for the right to claim supremacy. The competitors would be judged both standing relaxed and flexing, solo and against one another. If the excitement didn't come from the actual competition itself, there was certainly enough generated by these charismatic men, not to mention from the fans.

Bodybuilding then was as underground an activity as they came, on par with knife throwing and midget wrestling. When bodybuilding fans gathered in one place, they felt supremely comfortable in their own skin. A competition like the Mr. Olympia was the one place where they knew they wouldn't be treated to raised eyebrows and haughty sniffs when waxing poetic over the virtues of peaked biceps and washboard abs.

Thirty-nine years later, Weider Publications had gone from being a mom-and-pop operation from New Jersey, living day-to-day financially, to a $350 million purchase for American Media, Inc., one of the world's largest publishing corporations. Since the first Olympia, the word bodybuilding has been scrubbed mostly clean of the hoary connotations that had clung to it, thanks to the large-scale distribution of magazines such as Weider's FLEX and MUSCLE & FITNESS and the highly polished image of the sport's number-one poster boy, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gyms have sprouted up across the globe, and the supplement business has gone from being the domain of snake-oil salesmen to that of multinational nutritional conglomerates. By mid-2004, bodybuilding was as familiar to the masses as Joe Weider had always predicted it would be.

The sport grew as a mainstream physical pursuit, but pro bodybuilding didn't experience the same growth spurt. Sure, there were more pro bodybuilders and prize money had increased spectacularly, but the landscape was uncertain. Contests came and went, promoters went bust and athletes went unpaid. Contest calendars lurched forward on a year-to-year basis. There was no plan. Professional bodybuilding had no professional feel.

Although billions of dollars were spent each year on nutritional supplements and gym memberships, the 2003 Mr. Olympia competition failed to sell out its 5,000-seat venue at Mandalay Bay Events Center. In nearly 40 years, the base of true "hardcore" bodybuilding fans remained virtually unchanged in size. The scenario was akin to that of a red giant star--a rapidly expanding mass that eventually implodes due to a lack of core energy sustaining it.

So last May, when AMI CEO David Pecker decided to purchase half-ownership rights to the Mr. Olympia contest from the IFBB, it was with the knowledge that something had to be done to energize bodybuilding's core. He realized almost immediately that like a red giant, the contest, and professional competitive bodybuilding itself, was on the edge of collapse. Without proper handling, it too could end up forming a black hole of its own.