The Big Show

Every year they come to Las Vegas in October. By the thousands, the average of physique migrate to the desert to worship at the Super Bowl of supermen, the Olympia contest, in which the best bodybuilders in the world--male and female--compete for the most money and the most prestige.

And every year, Ronnie Coleman, the greatest bodybuilder of all time, ends it on exactly the wrong note. "My message to y'all is this: Let's start being good to one another. Let's start putting our faith in our lord and savior, Jesus Christ," he said during the 2005 contest after collapsing on the stage of the Orleans Arena when he won the Mr. Olympia title for the eighth time. Coleman didn't quite collapse into the fetal position, but it was as close as 300 pounds of muscle on a five-foot-nine frame can get to fetal. And there he remained, folded, oiled, hairless, clad in a G-string, his truly maximum gluteus maximus muscles angled slightly upward to heaven. For almost a minute and a half he stayed there, until he was presented with the winner's check for $150,000.

"God has a plan for each and every one of y'all," he said. "There's something that he has in store for you that you never know what it is until you just keep your faith in him and you keep striving, keep working hard, stay dedicated, stay faithful, do the right thing. I never ever thought I'd become Mr. Olympia, but God had a plan for me, and I'm carrying it out and I'm enjoying it. Please keep your faith in God. Keep praying. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up."

So there he was, a guy with biceps as big as my head--who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger filtered through Picasso's cubist period, with terrifying fractals of sinew thrusting in directions heretofore unknown in human anatomy, with veins that bulge like snakes digesting a hamster--and he was speaking to this audience of about 6,000 true-believing muscleheads at the climactic moment of the number-one display of earthly power in a sport that is about nothing except the display of earthly power, and what did Ronnie Coleman do? He endorsed an ancient philosopher who said, "The meek shall inherit the earth."

It was enough to cause cognitive dissonance in the musclehead audience, and in previous years they had booed him. This year they didn't. They sat confused while the rest of the winners were announced. After a year of monastic training, Jay Cutler, Coleman's main rival, finally showed up with a wingspan to match Coleman's heretofore unchallenged arms. But Cutler finished second, as he had in four previous contests. A relatively new guy, Gustavo Badell, finished third for the second time. The German Günter Schlierkamp, with his 100-watt smile and Schwarzeneggeresque accent, had finally smoothed over a problem with his glute-hamstring tie-ins (a.k.a. saggy ass) and may have deserved higher than fourth. But for now all roads to the summit of Olympia go through Coleman, who has the most colossal biceps, triceps, glutes, lats and everything else in the entire history of bodies, as well as a mouth that is incapable of talking smack in this pagan age when only the loudest, foulest and most unsportsmanlike get noticed.

The problem had been noted. The previous Olympia, in 2004, was the last to be held at the Mandalay Bay hotel and the first to be run by American Media Inc. (publisher of Star and The National Enquirer), which bought a line of fitness magazines and 50 percent of the Olympia from Joe and Ben Weider, two brothers who have run the sport through the International Federation of BodyBuilders, or IFBB, since 1946. American Media pledged to bring bodybuilding into the 21st century with a large dollop of celebrity glitz, smack talk from professional wrestlers, a projected computerized scoreboard with buzzers and flashing lights and a new system of scoring, which nobody understood, to replace the old system, which nobody understood either.

AMI announced all this during the 2004 Olympia at a press conference in the main arena before it brought in the competitors, about 60 in all in the different divisions: Mr. Olympia, Ms. Olympia, Ms. Fitness Olympia and Ms. Figure Olympia. Most bodybuilders, being intense introverts who can take the long hours of solitary weight lifting and prefer to let their muscles do their talking, have a problem becoming celebrities, who must display social skills. After the sainted Schwarzenegger, can you even name a contemporary bodybuilder? Fabio? Lou Ferrigno?

Faced with this dilemma, AMI executives had drafted Triple H, a champion wrestler from the WWE, which specializes in the art of talking smack, to serve as master of ceremonies.

"What do you think of the new format?" Triple H asked Coleman.

"If the new format is all about competing, that's what I'm here for," said Coleman.

"Can you beat Ronnie?" he asked Cutler.

"We'll see on Saturday," Cutler said.

"That's tired bodybuilding talk for 'I'm going to whip his ass,' " said Triple H. He had the formidable job of eliciting repartee from the exhausted competitors, who dehydrate themselves and eat only protein before a competition to get their skin wrapped tightly on their muscles for maximum definition. Deprived of energy, their brains develop a temporary form of dementia; they forget to sign documents or lose their keys and leave their posing music at home. They'll say, "Oh sorry, man. Low carbs. I can't remember nothin'."

Finally Schlierkamp got into the spirit and threatened to kick Coleman's ass. "I did it before, and I can do it again," he announced. Which was true, but the ass kicking was in 2002 in a minor contest in New Orleans.

"What have you done lately?" asked Coleman. "I did what I had to do. It's on, baby. This is the show."

They then stood up. They glared. They tore off their sweat suits. They flexed their muscles at each other.

"You're going to be a Bum"

Back in the misty aeons of yore, some ape with an unusually large cranial capacity, searching for protein, plunged a stick into an anthill and created the first labor-saving device. A few thousand generations later, the ape's descendants created a world full of labor-saving devices, especially for the middle and upper classes, the males of which began to notice they all looked like pussies. Having eliminated the economic necessity of muscle, they found themselves without its ornamental aspect. It seemed wrong that guys who were dumb enough to still do actual productive work should possess the bulges and ripples that melt females and awe other males.

Something had to be done, or even lifted. One of the first American entrepreneurs to figure out that this vast demographic of unmanned men and yet to be manned boys might be a market was Bob Hoffman (1898--1985), a World War I veteran who turned a small foundry into an assembly line for labor-creating devices: York Barbell of York, Pennsylvania, the Microsoft of muscle in the mid--20th century. With Hoffman's workers doubling as a weight-lifting team, (continued on page 140)the big show(continued from page 66) York became a scene, and Hoffman bestrode it like a Greek god, promising all men they could resemble him if only they lifted enough York barbells.

Hoffman made a great deal of money, but his vision had a flaw. He thought the point of weight lifting was to lift a lot of weight. He wanted his teams to win medals, and he promoted weightlifting shows. Guys would go onstage and strain, grunt and sweat as if they worked for a living. It wasn't graceful. It wasn't pretty. It lacked the extended story lines of baseball and football. It connoted the economic necessity of muscle when the crowds craved only its display.

The guy who figured out Hoffman's mistake was the aforementioned Joe Weider. Born a generation later, in 1922, Weider dropped out of the seventh grade to help support his family, which had emigrated from Poland to Montreal in 1919. Delivering groceries in a wagon, he often had to defend himself amid the ethnic tensions of the day and started lifting weights. He also had a lot of time to think, and at the age of 17 he took his life savings of $7 and purchased a used mimeograph machine. The future, he saw, was not in barbells, which are purchased once or twice in a lifetime. The future was in advice you could repackage and resell every month. He wrote four pages, called the pamphlet Your Physique and mailed it off to 600 weight lifters whose addresses he had gleaned by going to shows and reading health magazines.

"As my mother said, 'You're a kid. You think you're going to compete with Bob Hoffman? He's a multimillionaire, and he controls all the associations. You better learn a trade or you're going to be a bum,' " Weider recalls in his huge hotel suite 27 floors above the Olympia competition. "My father said, 'To be a worker and to be a dead man is the same thing. You take orders and you shut up. Whatever Joe wants to do, let him do it. It's his life, and he's a smart boy.' "

Joe and his father prevailed, and both parents were impressed a year and a half later when he had accumulated $10,000, a huge sum during the Depression. Hoffman was also impressed, banning the teenager from his events and forbidding other weight lifters to order Weider's rapidly growing magazine.

"Hoffman couldn't stand any competitor," Weider says in an accent that is often imitated but rarely duplicated, with its Yiddish, Polish, French, Canadian and Californian nuances. "He had his magazine, Strength and Health, and he was writing mostly about strength training because he was interested in winning weight lifting at the Olympics. He figured I was taking good potential athletes and encouraging them to do bodybuilding. He was losing his grip. For me, it was just common sense: How many guys want to kill themselves lifting heavy weights? And how many guys want to look good for girls? I figured I had 100-to-one odds. Plus Hoffman was very prejudiced. He loved the Nazis. He didn't like minorities. He thought Hitler was making the German people strong, teaching them strength through joy and all that kind of stuff."

Ladies' night

In Pumping Iron--the 1977 bodybuilding documentary that turned a small niche sport into a medium-size niche sport--Schwarzenegger famously says that the feeling of blood rushing to a strained muscle, known as the pump, is better than sex. Bodybuilders love the pump and identify with anyone else who loves it. Fans give women bodybuilders a lot of respect because their love for the pump is so pure. The women make a fraction of the men's money and get few endorsements, and they endure many horrified stares, all for the love of the pump. The sad truth is that muscleheads do not buy expensive tickets to look at the women. Not enough muscle. And men in general still find women bodybuilders weird and threatening.

So on ladies' night at the 2004 competition, the Mandalay Bay Events Center was about half full, and the Ms. Olympia contestants, lightweight and heavyweight divisions (below and above 135 pounds), were not exactly hidden but one act among many. The aspirants to Ms. Fitness Olympia ran through gymnastic routines that fell somewhere between cheerleading and striptease, and the contestants for Ms. Figure Olympia looked statuesque with their hint of muscularity and nice boobs. Eight-time Ms. Olympia Lenda Murray lost her title to Iris Kyle, who simply had bigger arms. Both of them had very large muscles but also tried to look feminine and elegant, which is a trick.

Women who take massive doses of steroids develop many of the same side effects as men: acne like an aerial relief map of Peru, hair on the back and other undesirable places and male-pattern baldness on the head. Opposite sexes also develop opposite side effects. Male bodybuilders can develop gynecomastia, which is to say they grow breasts, while women tend to lose theirs as testosterone burns their body fat. Many women compensate with implants, the architecture of which rarely fits the landscape. Steroids raise the male voice and drop the female voice. Some female bodybuilders give the impression of being transsexuals.

A man taking artificial testosterone (which is what steroids are) will see his genitalia shrink because his testicles have concluded that they need not produce natural testosterone. If he stops taking steroids, he will suffer from estrogen rebound while his testicles decide to produce again, which is to say he will get depressed and fat. A woman can take so much testosterone that she develops an enlarged, penis-like clitoris, which is taped back into the vagina when she displays herself in a G-string.

A man who is into women with large muscles and an elongated clitoris is called a schmo. Schmoes are a small part of the audience for bodybuilding and are not regarded as true muscleheads. A top woman bodybuilder who shall remain nameless was recently offered $10,000 and a first-class airline ticket to Texas to tie up a schmo, whip him and ride him around a corral for an hour.

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After World War II Hoffman continued to push weight lifters as the ideal of masculinity. He campaigned relentlessly against the bodybuilders Weider was promoting in his magazines, disparaging them as "Weedy men" and showing caricatures with broad shoulders, narrow hips and muscular legs, which he declared effeminate. Weider was happy to be so disparaged. Hoffman's readers flocked to him, and he built a financial empire of magazines, equipment and supplements, all promising access to the Weedy physique. It was a turning point in the history of the male body: muscle mass-marketed to the average guy as pure ornament. All Weider needed was a personality behind the ornament.

"Arnold won a title in London, and I bought him a ticket to come over here," Weider says. "I saw in him the determination and the charm and the willpower. See, some people are born with the will to power. The Nietzschean man has the will to power, and Schwarzenegger had that. Whatever he was going to do, he was going to win. And not one bodybuilder disliked him. He made friends instantly. Every sport has to have a hero. A hero brings the sport and the fans around to him. Schwarzenegger had a joy for life and a will to power."

In sports the will to power often becomes the will to cheat, I suggest.

"You can use power for good or bad," Weider says. "It's up to you. What does a competitor want?"

The subject is veering toward steroids, which the Olympia does not test for. "Every sport uses steroids," Weider says. "Some more, some less. People have some fantasy that a bodybuilder is someone who just sits there and takes drugs. Not true. Anybody who goes to the gym and uses resistance to change his appearance is a bodybuilder. It would be a good idea if you read the predictions I made in 1950, because bodybuilders have changed our culture since then. The rules bodybuilders follow, everything they do to get where they want to go, have taken over the world."

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During the afternoon of most bodybuilding events, the competitors come onstage in groups of four and flex their muscles in predetermined poses at the command of the judges, who grade them on tightness, definition and shape in the various muscle groups, as well as on size. In the evening the top guys come back and do their posing routines, in which they are required to hit certain poses but may move as they see Fit. Most work with choreographers, and some do a reasonable facsimile of dancing, disproving the widespread myth that extremely muscular men can't get loose. Indeed, some close their routines with a full split.

It used to be compulsory to do the posing routine to the theme from Exodus. The song was on a 45 rpm single, and at the end of each routine someone would lift the needle and start it again--for years the Exodus theme over and over and over again. Since 1978 each bodybuilder has been allowed to choose his own music. Most start with some Exodus-like classical theme that morphs into heavy metal or hip-hop. Only Coleman can get away with posing to "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

The grand climax has, until 2004, been the pose-down, in which all the finalists come out and strike their poses to emphasize their own best features in contrast to their opponents' worst. The bodybuilders step in front of each other a lot and otherwise try to express the kinesis of alpha masculinity. The muscleheads get excited and goad their favorites to ever more intense flexing with lines you don't hear in any other sport: "You can't win a show with soft boobs!"

The bodybuilders are illuminated by bright white spotlights shining at a 45degree angle to eliminate shadows. This also bleaches out their muscles, so all the contestants stain their skin dark brown and then oil themselves to enhance definition. In Pumping Iron, all the athletes have unoiled white skin; now it's hard to tell the white guys from the black guys. They also used to wear the equivalent of tight swimming trunks; now they wear posing trunks that are about halfway between a jock and a thong. This allows closer inspection of the crucially important glute-hamstring tie-ins; that is, the area where the butt meets the thigh, which is chronically difficult to smooth out. It also allows the bodybuilders to bounce their ass muscles, which is a big audience favorite. If you suggested there was anything homoerotic about a pulsating gluteus maximus, all true muscleheads would be deeply offended.

In the months before a contest bodybuilders eat a meal of protein and vegetables (say, fish and broccoli, plus supplements of vitamins, amino acids and other stuff advertised as the next best thing to steroids) every two hours, on the theory that numerous small meals crank the metabolism and burn fat. Eating such an unbalanced diet lacking nearly all carbohydrates, followed by carbohydrate loading, requires tremendous discipline--bodybuilders drink two or three gallons of water a day to flush their kidneys of all that protein--and creates an ungodly gas problem. I wasn't overwhelmed in the huge Events Center, but in less roomy venues the doors are left open and there are a lot of electric fans. If you see a bunch of bodybuilders together on a plane, sit in another section.

It used to smell a lot worse. When bodybuilders first started painting themselves brown, they had to stand naked while the dye was brushed on and remain standing for several hours while it dried. Then they had to do it all over again. Six to 10 applications over three days. With no showers. Then a woman named Jan Tana began marketing a tan in a bottle that is sprayed on in one 15minute session before an appearance and followed by a slathering of Posing Gel ("Maximizes muscularity, vascularity and hardness").

Another reason bodybuilders eat a lot (up to and beyond 14,000 calories a day) is that some of them take large amounts of human growth hormone, which burns muscle, including the heart, if it's not burning food. HGH makes all the soft tissue in your body grow, including the cartilage between the plates of your skull. When you hear a sports commentator gripe that an athlete has an unnaturally large head because of steroids, the culprit drug is possibly HGH. An HGH head is round like a basketball. A steroid head is squared off, especially at the jaw.

When a top bodybuilder thinks nobody is looking and relaxes his washboard abs, he looks like a pregnant hippopotamus.

After a contest, when the bodybuilder no longer has to drain all his water and fat for maximum muscle definition, it is not unusual for him to gain 20 pounds in 48 hours. In the off-season, a 290-pound bodybuilder can easily balloon to 350 pounds. Getting to optimum weight is called peaking and can be done only once or twice a year.

Some bodybuilders inject irritants into their muscles to make them swell. They inject steroids into their asses. Older bodybuilders and professional wrestlers have calloused asses. One bodybuilder who shall remain nameless recently tried to inject HGH directly into his thigh, which caused it to swell to three times its normal size and his scrotum to blow up to grapefruit proportions. He had to go to the hospital or lose his leg.

Most bodybuilders are short; many will add an inch or two to their official height. (Coleman, for example, bills himself as five-11.) As a tall person among them, I thought, Aha, this is a way for small men to make themselves large. There may be some truth to that. It is also true, however, as a short bodybuilder explained to me, that a large muscle on a short bone bulges bigger than a large muscle on a long bone. Standing onstage by himself, flexing to "Ride of the Valkyries," a short guy with 60 extra pounds of muscle looks like a colossus. A tall guy with 60 extra pounds of muscle looks like a swimmer, and who's going to pay to look at a swimmer? So in rock and roll, horse racing and bodybuilding, short guys usually rule.

I will admit that I take a lot of pride in being taller than Schwarzenegger. I saw him once on the street in New York just after Pumping Iron came out, and I distinctly recall looking down at the top of his head. Backstage at the Events Center, he was wearing cowboy boots with high heels, and I was still looking down at the top of his head. Since I am six-two, I estimate the governor of California to be about five-10, not the six-two he has claimed to be since Pumping Iron made him a celebrity. The Austrian Oak is a girlie man, and that's all there is to it.

The Question of Respect

I looked up the "10 Predictions" Weider published in the July 1950 issue of Your Physique. He said civilization would speed up, causing illnesses of all kinds to increase. He said physical fitness would be the countertrend and its principles (balanced diet, adequate sleep and so on) would sweep the world. "Bodybuilding will become the stepping stone to every other sport and physical activity," he said, and those who practice it will be happier and more productive. These aren't bad as prophecies go. The 10th makes the largest claim: "I predict that bodybuilding will one day become one of the greatest forces in existence and that it may be hailed as the activity that actually saves civilization from itself."

Up there on Weider's mountaintop, one can just make out football, baseball, basketball and Hollywood, the godly arenas for American male heroism made vastly bigger because of bodybuilding. Most of the time, in most sports, the most muscular athlete wins, and this truism was not so obvious a mere five decades ago. Without bodybuilding, football linemen would weigh as much as Vince Lombardi, home-run hitters would have the pumpkin-on-toothpicks physique of Babe Ruth, basketball forwards would have the arms of Bill Bradley, movie strongmen would be lumpy squat guys like Anthony Quinn in La Strada, and Gray Davis would still be governor of California. Men looked like crap before Weider, and respect must be paid.

Has civilization shown that respect? Well, the most prominent admitted user of steroids in the world made a gazillion dollars, married a Kennedy and got elected governor of California after a reign as the biggest star in Hollywood. Meanwhile we have panicked testimony before Congress that 5 million people, including half a million teenagers, are taking steroids for the same reasons Schwarzenegger did: to get stronger and look better. Little regulated, much investigated and heavily criminalized, steroids are condemned by politicians and the sports press as sinful, and the wages of sin, they imply, is death.

So that's one problem. The more respect bodybuilding gets, the less respect bodybuilding gets.

A second problem is that no new Schwarzenegger is on the horizon. Coleman is undoubtedly the greatest pure bodybuilder ever. Having seen him onstage with Schwarzenegger, I would guess Coleman is about an inch shorter and outweighs Schwarzenegger at his peak by 60 or more pounds of muscle mass. Coleman makes Conan the Barbarian look about as ripped as your mother. He is not, however, a good quote. A journalist will forgive just about anything, but if you don't help him fill white space between the ads, he's not going to make you a star. "I don't tell people to take steroids or not to take them," said Coleman, a former middle linebacker at Grambling State University and a part-time policeman in Arlington, Texas. "It's their life. I don't advise anything on that." This was the most interesting thing he said to me. On the wide beach of celebrity, Schwarzenegger kicks sand in his face.

So the illegality of steroids and their obvious use in the sport create certain natural limits on the interest in bodybuilders, just as there are natural limits on the interest in politicians. Both spend their careers not talking about what they are talking about.

Of course real muscleheads don't care if Coleman has original ideas. They like muscle, identify with muscle and want to have muscle for themselves. Weider Nutrition International does business to the tune of $250 million a year. And the IFBB, founded by the Weider brothers to shut Hoffman out of the sport forever, now boasts 175,000 members in 173 countries. You can't go broke selling masculinity to men.

"There's one thing you should know about Joe and me," says Ben Weider, who was born in 1924. "We've never, ever worked with money as a goal. It was the passion for doing the right thing. Remember, if you go back to the 1940s and 1950s, bodybuilding was laughed at. Doctors thought you'd get an enlarged heart. They thought an athlete's heart was bad for you. Coaches thought if you exercised you'd become muscle-bound and wouldn't be able to play sports. That's what we fought against all those years. When we founded the IFBB, everyone thought we were nuts."

Ben, the federation's president since its inception, has the gracious air of a diplomat; he has essentially served as his brother's secretary of state. The IFBB, he points out, has a professional division, which does not test for steroids and sanctions events like the Olympia, and an amateur division, which does test for steroids and has for decades been lobbying to become an Olympic sport. For that, you must be steroid-free or at least make a believable attempt at it.

"Controlling the doping situation in the amateur division costs us an arm and a leg," Ben says. "Every test costs about $300. When you test thousands of athletes, it becomes very expensive. I was an intelligence officer during World War II. I never once met a German prisoner who was a Nazi. And here I have never met a bodybuilder who was found positive and admitted to using steroids. Once we had a girl from Singapore sue after she was found positive, and at the hearing, which lasted three days, she finally broke down under questioning and said, 'Yes, I use drugs.' Just this one case cost us $60,000."

Enter Schwarzenegger

When Joe Weider started the Mr. Olympia contest in 1965, it was the first competition for professional bodybuilders. The top prize was $1,000 until 1973, when Weider cut it by $250. Upon receiving his check for his fourth title, Schwarzenegger took the microphone, walked to the center of the stage and said, "I train all year. 1 diet all year. Last year I win $1,000. This year I win $750. Something is wrong with this sport."

First prize went back to $1,000 in 1974 and $2,500 the next year, after which Schwarzenegger retired from competition and became a promoter operating under the IFBB's aegis. He invested in professional staging, lighting and sound for the first time. He increased the prize money to $50,000 by 1980, at which point he came out of retirement and won the contest one more time before revolutionizing the Hollywood action hero.

Nowadays a top bodybuilder can earn in the high six figures with income from contests, endorsements, appearances, column writing, photo signings, personal training for rich people and modeling. Bodybuilders without sponsors struggle with day jobs, which don't usually allow for lunch breaks every two hours. Just as musicians often sell pot because the hours are flexible, bodybuilders sometimes give art a higher priority than law.

"I got caught up in trying to make a fast buck so I could continue to train without having to take a nine-to-five job--the old don't-pay-for-your-ana-bolics-when-you-can-get-some-and-sell-some game," says Craig Titus, a former Mr. USA and top 10 bodybuilder. "Steroids and things of that nature weren't that big a deal at the time, and they decided to make an example of me in the sport and in the whole professional athletic world. And they did. I went to prison for 26 months. No female companionship, no family, just sitting there in a cell while other bodybuilders surpassed me. Prison makes you reflect on what you were doing before you got there. It's no joke."

Married to highly ranked fitness athlete Kelly Ryan, with whom he has a daughter, Titus now has seven sponsors (ranging from Pinnacle Nutrition to APT wrist straps), makes good money and is reluctant to say anything that might annoy the authorities who locked him up in 1997. But he still has opinions. "I was one of the select athletes who went to Iowa and testified before the grand jury in the BALCO investigation, and I'm telling you the same thing I told them," he says. "I cannot agree with the money being spent on investigating anabolic steroids when alcohol and tobacco are still legal. Thousands of people die from those substances every day. Nobody is dying from anabolic steroids. It's crazy. I don't use them anymore myself, just supplements, which are absolutely necessary in this sport. But a bodybuilder can take 250 milligrams of testosterone and feel like a million bucks. And I'm not talking about this roid-rage bullshit. I've never seen it. I'm talking about aggression in the gym. I'm talking about a level of athletic ability like no other. I'm talking about a libido like no other, a sense of wellness like no other. Should they be made legal? No. Should they be available by prescription to athletes? Yes."

Is it possible to be a top bodybuilder without steroids?

"In general, no, I don't think it's possible," Titus says. "But I also don't think it's possible to break the record for the 100-meter dash at the Olympics without them. I don't think it's possible to hit 75 home runs without them or to gain 30 pounds of muscle in 10 months without them. The only difference between a bodybuilder and other elite athletes is that die bodybuilder is a walking billboard for steroid use. You can't tell with the others because the steroids are used to enhance different abilities. Steroids are used in every major sport. I know."

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Bodybuilders have a reputation for being horny. If you were walking around with 10 times the testosterone you had at the age of 19, you'd be horny too. Perhaps this explains Governor Schwarzenegger's lifelong habit of groping. At the same time, your testicles, which make testosterone, will assume they have no useful function and shrivel to the size of peas. I have been told by bodybuilders that you can take a couple of drugs to resume normal testicular function when you go off steroids. But the drugs don't always work.

Groupies behave around bodybuilders the way they behave around any other professional athletes. No matter what their testosterone level, the pros nonetheless don't take much advantage of their status as they pursue their ascetic training routines. "You just don't have time for that stuff," Titus says. "You can't hook up with a girl on Friday night and expect to do well at a show on Saturday. The players aren't top bodybuilders, and the top bodybuilders aren't players."

Tales from an Ex-Promoter

"Every time a test catches up with a new drug, there are probably five more variations of that drug that it can't detect and 10 more variations that the testers don't even know exist," says Wayne DeMilia, former president of the IFBB pro division. "The guys say, 'You're going to test for these things? Okay, I'm going to take those things. You wanna test for those things? I'll take these things.' What have you accomplished? So we don't test for steroids, because it's an incomplete test. The diuretics we test for are the most dangerous ones, the ones that can kill."

That happened once, in 1992. A bodybuilder named Mohammed Benaziza died from an overdose of diuretics in Europe. And another guy almost died the following year at the Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio. When bodybuilders dehydrate themselves with all kinds of diuretics, they deplete not only their fluids but also their minerals, which can induce a heart attack. The guy in Columbus was so macho he didn't want to go to the hospital, even as his body was shutting down from lack of potassium. Once in the emergency room, he was so embarrassed that he whispered the drugs he'd been taking to DeMilia, who relayed the information to the astonished doctors. He was saved with an IV mineral drip for the diuretics and some candy bars from the nurses station to counter the HGH. The IFBB pro division has tested for diuretics but not steroids ever since.

These are sad stories, but compare them with those of the young men who have died from broken necks or heatstroke while playing football, or the many old football players with artificial knees and early Alzheimer's from too many concussions.

"Sports is entertainment," DeMilia says. "We are all fans, and we always want to see something better. If we don't get it, we go elsewhere with our dollar. Why does an athlete take drugs? To make die big money longer. If you want to get rid of drugs, get rid of the money. Every sport has to decide where to draw the line. And I don't know. Whatever the athletes do, nobody is forcing them to do it. I don't go to anybody and put a gun to his head and say, 'I want you to become a Mr. Olympia competitor.' We live in a free society. We just create the venue for them to compete and make money and for the fans to be entertained. And you can see that they love it."

One of the great innovators in bodybuilding (it was he who suggested everyone stop posing to the Exodus theme), DeMilia was promoter of the Olympia from 1981 to 2003 and has been promoter of New York's Night of Champions since he created it in 1978. Being the promoter means putting the show together, selling the tickets and giving the Weiders 15 percent of the gross for the IFBB sanction. "The Weiders sold half the Olympia to American Media, which bought their magazines, and it's going to promote the Olympia now," DeMilia says. "I'm out. Its goal is to make bodybuilding mainstream, but you can't make it mainstream. It's not. It's specialized. Go to a health club on Monday night in New York when it's crowded. You'll see 200 people working out, and maybe one or two of them are serious about this sport. That's how small our demographic is. It's just a certain guy who's a fan, and he's looking at male bodies but not in a sexual way. He admires it, he wants to be it, he's in awe of it, and that's all. For most people it's odd to see men looking at other almost naked men. But that's the bodybuilding fan. He's checking out that glute-hamstring tie-in, and if it's tight, he's going, 'Oh man, he's got striated glutes. Unbelievable!' I'm talking bodybuilding freakiness.

"That's what they want. You have to understand that, market to it, have the fan hyperventilating, thinking, Oh man, I've got to see that. It's not sexual, but it's not going to become respectable, either. You take that away from the hard-core fan and you're not going to create a new fan base. All you're going to do is drive away the people who support you. The fan base is small, and it's coming to see freaks. There's that constant pressure for more muscle. Where will it end? Well, it's not going to end. That's the scary thing. We have no idea where we're going."

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Having watched the Olympia for three years, I have wondered the same thing. The big change in Mr. Olympia since 2004 is that the posing routine with music isn't important anymore. In fact it was barely part of the 2004 and 2005 night shows. The 19 contestants were introduced, their point totals from the afternoon preliminaries were announced, and they posed to music for a strictly limited two minutes. This was a drag because they weren't being judged and it's the only truly creative part of the show. Whatever you think of bodybuilders, it's fascinating to watch anyone with 200 pounds of extra muscle try to dance. But in this new format, contestants were judged mostly in the afternoon, so there was no suspense and no point other than to give the losers a moment in the spotlight. The athletes were visibly spiritless.

At that point in the 2004 Olympia, Sylvester Stallone (another guy with lots of horizontal bulge and not much vertical extension) read the new rules for the challenge round: The top six guys were to pick a body part they thought was better than the other guy's body part and challenge him. The contestants squared off with five seconds to pose, and a 1950s quiz-show buzzer went off. The judges voted, and the results were flashed on another innovation: a large computerized scoreboard. This all sounds okay in theory as a suspense builder, but it replaced most of the time previously spent watching a choreographed, creative posing routine with watching a scoreboard. The competition is more like other sports now, but bodybuilding isn't like other sports.

Another bummer was that once, say, Schlierkamp, had challenged Marcus Ruhle to a back double biceps and Schlierkamp lost, Ruhle could choose back double biceps again when it was his turn to challenge Schlierkamp. The judges, once more evaluating the same pose, of course decided exactly the same way. What's the point?

Cutler was in second place and Coleman in first. They had beaten die others at every pose, and finally it came down to one final pose between them. Coleman called out a "rear-lat, lights-out, game-over spread" and won with a rippling display of his massive back. The crowd of 6,000 got pretty excited, but it was somehow less human than the previous year. Schwarzenegger, who was juggling his duties as governor of California and executive editor of Muscle and Fitness magazine, came onstage to give Coleman his seventh Eugen Sandow trophy and a check for $120,000. "I used to flex my muscles for bodybuilding," Schwarzenegger said. "Now I flex my muscles for California. I promise you I'll be back." That got a big cheer. His plug for President Bush got a mixed response, which turned to religious ecstasy as the bodybuilders ran out into the audience to shake hands and sign autographs. Then they ran backstage for an orgy of carbohydrate loading with pizza and Gatorade.

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In Las Vegas in October 2005, at the 40th anniversary of the Mr. Olympia competition, it happened all over again. Schwarzenegger was there--a bit chastened after a year in office--as was an older-looking Joe Weider. But this time, after Coleman rose from his fetal position to accept die Sandow trophy and the $150,000 first prize, a rumble of dissent moved through die crowd.

Backstage, Cutler was cornered by TV reporters and asked if he'd even thought he had a chance to best Coleman after four second-place finishes. He did. "Me and a whole lot of people in this audience did," he said. "They wanted to see a change." He shook his head. "It's just Mr. Olympia, man. It seems they don't want to give it to anyone else."

"Yeah, but Jay Cutler will be back next year, right?" asked one of the reporters.

Cutler looked angry enough to use his colossal biceps for more than ornamental purposes. "What's the point?" he said and stalked off to his dressing room.

Massive heads and godlike glutes...pump lovers,schmoes...and the biggest arms in the history of arms.Backstage at Mr.olympia and the frreaky world of professional body building

Coleman looks like Schwarzenegger filtered through Picasso's cubist period.