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So, bodybuilding is going to become an Olympic Sport, or at least that is what we are told by Ben Welder. What is it going to mean for real Bodybuilders? Does anyone want it? At the end of the day, I suspect that the Olympics will not be the thing that changes Bodybuilding as we know it now.

Ron Ball on........

Bodybuilding

& THE OLYMPICS

The present situation, as I understand it is that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have recognised the IFBB has a legitimate organisation representing bodybuilders and that the lOC will now be giving serious consideration to the possibility that the Sport can be given full Olympic recognition. In the meantime, the IFBB has until the Games in 2004 to put forward a full programme of events and to apply for bodybuilding to be granted “demonstration sport status” at those Games.

Ben Weider has been pushing the idea of bodybuilding becoming recognised as an Olympic Sport for many years. This, he has argued, would give the sport legitimacy, able to be treated seriously just like all the other established sports. The tact is that most of the international sports establishments regard bodybuilding as nothing more than beauty contests for men and muscular women. Added to which each Olympic Games is becoming such a ponderous great dinosaur that it costs millions (or billions) to organise and can almost bankrupt the bodies and countries doing the organising. On top of this, there is an increasing resistance to adding more sports which depend on opinions for the selection of winners and losers. Although if Ballroom Dancing and Synchronised Swimming can be Olympic Sports, I suppose anything is possible.

To be a competitive Bodybuilder these days even to enter local and area contests - requires levels of commitment and discipline way above most other sports. As David Parry said at a recent seminar in our Gym, you have to be a bodybuilder 24 hrs per day, seven days per week. You have to eat the right foods, in the right quantities, at the right times; to train correctly, pushing yourself all the time to do better - with more reps per set, or with heavier weights, or at a faster pace, etc. - to get plenty of rest; to supplement your diet with a spectrum of products - some good, some bad, some legal, some not so legal. And after all this, you have the torture and commitment to dieting down to ridiculously low bodyfat levels to stand a chance of winning a contest, which will get you an almost valueless (in money terms) trophy and recognition by nobody outside the sport of Bodybuilding. The sheer cost of preparing for a contest is so high (in money terms) that many men are now deterred from ever giving it serious consideration and for women there are the additional obstacles of not knowing what the rules will be from one month to another. It would be nice to think that top bodybuilders could get more monetary recognition for what they do.
But is the whole Olympic Games thing really a fantasy? The ability of anyone in any sport to earn decent money from their activity depends on its pulling power for television.

Little Balls & Sandy Holes?
Golf to me Is the most boring thing imaginable short of being dead, but there are hours and hours of wall to wall golf on TV relayed from every corner of the globe and this allows golfers to earn vast sums of money from knocking their little balls down a series of holes spread across a field, which sometimes has a few ponds and sandy holes dotted around to try to make the business slightly interesting.
I remember seeing Billy Connelly on his World Tour of Australia standing in a desert where they had laid plastic grass to create an artificial golf course and his remarking that this was the sort of thing that happened when people took seriously what the people of Scotland had intended as a joke. But nevertheless Nick Faldo, at the height of his career, could earn more than Ł5m per year!!

Some footballers earn obscene sums of money it has to be admitted that many do not - much of it not - for actually playing football. How about Ł5,000 per month for agreeing to have breakfast once in each month with a man from the Daily Mail or Sun and just chat for a couple of hours about football in general. That money alone would be enough to keep many Bodybuilders very happy. But bodybuilding will never be able to get big crowds watching live or millions watching on TV to see the Mr Olympia (or any other contest) - and that's the test of earning power.
The WBF tried to make pro-bodybuilding in the U.S.A. into a pro-wrestling type TV extravaganza, but after the first year, the audience almost disappeared and the WBF collapsed. When darts was given top prime-time TV showings, a whole crowd of new performers became known to Joe Public and for a time, these guys (I cannot bring myself to call the heavy gutted boozers ‘sportsmen’) earned large sums of money.
When TV dropped the darts, the money rapidly started to disappear. But playing darts was something that many couch potatoes could associate themselves with. Most people have played darts at some time or other when we have had a few pints down the local pub. Butb ripped top level bodybuilders are rarely seen; more than ever they are like aliens to the general public and with the media only ever reporting bodybuilding as part of a steroid shock/horror story, we do not have a good start.

there is an increasing resistance to adding more sports which depend on opinions for the selection of winners and losers. Although if ballroom dancing and synchronised swimming can be Olympic sports, I suppose anything is possible.

NO KIDDING
Let's not kid ourselves that making body building into an Olympic Sport will generate vast amounts of sponsorship and money earning potential for the top men. It will not.
There are thousands of men and women who have competed as Olympic athletes and earned nothing. In the UK alone there are thousands who have spent all their own money and lived on a shoe-string to have the "honour” of representing GB at the Olympic Games. How many famous Rowers, Greco-Roman Wrestlers, Walkers, Shot-Putters, Discus Throwers, etc. etc. do you know? And some sports remain so obscure, I cannot even name the sports, let alone the participants.

If bodybuilding is to become an Olympic sport. the IFBB will have to accept all the IOC rules. As these stand at the moment, changes in principles are unlikely (in the short term), all athletes who wish to compete will have to be prepared to undergo random drugs tests. They will have to prove themselves drug free via such tests for up to 2 years before allowed to compete at all and then they will have to provide a full itinerary of their movements for their whole competing life and they must be prepared to undergo a random drug test at any time.

MORE HASSLE
There have been numerous occasions recently where athletes (not bodybuilders) have not complied with these regulations and have found themselves in trouble with the authorities. Now if bodybuilding does become an Olympic sport, I can tell you that the media of the world will be harrassing bodybuilders night and day, week in and week out to dig-out drug scandles. The IOC and the IFBB will be determined to prove that everything is OK and will subject bodybuilders to more testing than all the other sports put together. Because if steroids and other drugs help build bigger, stronger muscles, nobody on earth shows even a fraction of the massive muscle size of top bodybuilders - with them the muscle size is an end in itself.

It does not matter if your 100 metres is 2.0 or 3.0 secs slower or faster than Ben Johnson or if you can lift more or less than Gary Taylor; what matters is the size, shape and definition of your muscles. Now, do bodybuilders want all this drug testing? Some Pros say, when they are interviewed, that they would like to see drugs completely out of bodybuilding and that they wish they did not need to take drugs at all. Then off home they go and give themselves multiple shots of whatever it is they are on at the time. Then there are the various natural organisations, where apparently it is OK to use anything provided you can call it a food supplement!

Even now, some organisatlons are having problems getting enough contestants and crowds. Don’t tell me this is because of drugs. If it were, the natural events would be jammed to the doors - they are not!”

CONTROVERSIAL CREATINE
Let's forget creatine (although even this is now becoming re-defined as "the controversial drug”, creatine) and HMB and the rest, I am talking about these various pre-cursor compounds - like androstenedione, DHEA, androstenediol, etc. These are all banned by the IOC - they are all pre-cursors of testosterone - but not by the U.S.A. Natural Bodybuilding organisations (or American Baseball apparently). These products can significantly increase the amount of free testosterone in the blood stream and hence can make improvements in muscular performance and recovery. They can cause the body's own systems to shut-down testosterone production, just like steroids, and anyone using these could fail a drugs test (as the American Randy Barnes did recently - and, as I write, it seems possible that this was the case with one or more of the Irish rugby players as well.
As soon as a compound appears, the IOC or the FDA (in America) or the Medicines Control Agency (in the UK) bans or tries to ban it and then the manufacturers come along with a new compound which does the same, promises even more, but has a new name. It makes lots of money for the manufacturers. But these are all drugs! They just happen to be weaker and less effective than even simple oral steroids like dianabol - which at present on the UK black-market are generally cheaper.

Can the IO really judge this?

RANDOM DRUG TESTS?
Since Ben Weider's announcement about Olympic recognition, I have not noticed any great enthusiasm, or interest even, from ordinary bodybuilders - except from the supporters of the various natural organisations. My own impression is that if random drug testing becomes a serious regular happening, many of the bodybuilders will want to compete in different organisations where drugs tests are definitely not going to be carried out. Why? Is it perhaps that the men in suits and blazers forget why competitors are bodybuilders and what made them start going to the gym in the first place? It was because they wanted big muscles.

At first they may have just felt they wanted to be a bit bigger, but then as the bug took hold, wanted to push further and further. A 16” arm looked good, but an 18 or 20” arm would be better - much better. Very few bodybuilders went to the gym because they wanted to be fitter or healthier. A hardcore bodybuilder wants muscle more than anything else on this planet. Even when reality should tell on individual that he does not have the genetics for a Mr. Olympia physique, he will still keep trying and trying to get that awesome physique. And is it surprising that many will use all kinds of drugs and supplements which may just help.
All serious bodybuilders now know that steroids will make significant improvements to a muscular body and over the years, even if there are health risks, the evidence is that these have been much exaggerated.
There are other compounds which do pose significant health risks and some of these products cannot even be detected by drug tests - but which most bodybuilders will treat with great respect. The fad is that the really serious bodybuilders have all used drugs and want to continue using drugs. The difference between the best truely natural Bodybuilders (if there are any) and the best of the chemically assisted bodybuilders, is probably 20 to 80 lbs of muscle - maybe more!

DRUG TEST SUPPORT?
The majority of natural bodybuilders who look to have decent muscle size are not very tall - to maintain the same proportions on a man over 6ft probably remains impossible without drugs. Another matter which has to be considered is; will anyone support 100% drug tested contests? Sure, natural bodybuilding events can get good audiences but for the most part it is not the same audiences that go to NABBA, lFBB, EFBB, WABBA and other open established events. I have been to both and I will continue to do so - but it is necessary to change your judging criteria when you go to the natural (or at least "semi-natural") events.
If all the contests had physiques of the average standard of the naturals, would all these organisations be able to run so many contests? I think not.
Even now some organisatlons are having problems getting enough contestants and crowds. Don’t tell me this is because of drugs. If it were, the natural events would be jammed to the doors; they are not. And at any contest which competitors are the ones who get the audiences screaming and shouting? It's the freaks!! The guys who are pushing the limits of muscular development further and further.

I have never felt that getting bodybuilding into the Olympics was a particularly worthwhile objective. It will only make us another pawn in international politics, to be used by a collection of power mad, paranoid leaders to deflect attention from their own inadequacies and we will become even more the centre of all the hysteria about drugs in sport.
Ben Weider himself, while obviously having a commitment to bodybuilding, is prone to touring around the world collecting gongs (medals, honourory degrees, titles and assorted other paraphanalia) and, no doubt Olympic recognition will create a potential for a few more meaningless awards.

We asked the Queen her opinion..

..She just pissed herself laughing!..

We as bodybuilders get a lot of stick but ultimately, do we care? I love the sport. If the world outside wants us they should take us as we are. If they don’t like what they see, then, simple - sod ‘em!!
It there is a real threat to bodybuilding it is not this Olympics nonsense, it is the increasingly puritanical, authoritarian society in which we live. There have been a whole collection of drug and performance enhancement stories in the last few months, none of which has involved bodybuilders. The most dramatic, of course, has been the Tour de France Bike Race, which has demonstrated that few, if any, of the top cyclists do not use drugs. But more recently there have been reports of footballers and rugby players failing tests and suggestions that many players use steroids.
The managers, coaches and organising officials in rugby have been fairly unanimous in blaming the problem on bodybuilding gyms and one England coach has demanded that the Drugs Czar - ex Chief Constable Hallewell - should be giving attention to organising a motor investigation (presumably by the police) of bodybuilding gyms.
This, and Tony Banks' resolve to lead the war against drugs in sports could well cause serious problems and much hassle. If you have been reading this column over the years, you will know that my own views on liberty and the individual are quite clear - everybody should be allowed to do what they damn well like so long as it does not interfere with the rights and liberties of others (or, as Bernard Shaw said, provided it does not frighten the horses), but in Blair's World this is not an acceptable view. I will be writing more about this in the near future but in the meantime, be careful.

Ron Ball