THE FITNESS INTERNATIONAL: CONTEST REPORT
Columbus, Ohio – March 2nd
It is always difficult to do a "report" on a fitness contest. So much of the judging is subjective, and so much of it not based on what the competitors look like on stage, that you can often look at a line-up of the top six and have no idea in what order they will finish. Of course, there are factors that help you to predict the outcome. In a pro show, you generally know how the judges have scored competitors in the past. For example, there are a few fitness women who seem to have almost no "shape" to their bodies - looking like highly defined "stick figures" - that the judges like to place high in the figure rounds. Why? Go figure - pardon the pun. There are some who seem to benefit from political connections, others that get a lot of publicity, and so on. At a certain point, inquiring minds simply stop caring.
However, as fitness contests go, the Fitness International went very well. The production team put together by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Lorimer made things run smooth as a fitness competitor's legs. The lighting, for the first time, was excellent - and bright enough that the photographers were actually able to get shots of the routines. As usual, those routines ranged in quality from very good to superb. With 22 women in the show, watching the entire performance round can get pretty tedious after a while - but most of the individual routines were extremely entertaining.
Speaking of routines, I have written previously about the danger of doing fitness routines on a bare stage. On Friday night in Columbus, along with the fitness and female bodybuilding contests, there was also a gymnastics exhibition - and before it began the stage crew brought out gymnstics mats to lay over the hardwood floor. "Why don't we get to use mats?" said one of the fitness women later on. "That would certainly save us a lot of aches and pains and sore joints." In any event, if one of the competitors gets badly injured doing tumbling on a hard, slippery stage the federations cerainly can't claim they weren't warned.
Jenny Worth took first place in the contest, and Kelly Ryan second. Both are very attractive young women with good physiques and they certainly had two of the very best routines in the competition. One puzzle in the outcome was that Beth Horn, who won the NPC Nationals last year, placed 22nd - ended up dead last. Since many of the same judges that were at the Nationals last year were also on this judging panel, you have to wonder what could have happened to a national champion - or their opinion of her - to deteriorate so far so rapidly. Or else it calls into question the quality of NPC national competitors. In either event, as I said, it was a puzzle.
But the REALLY strange aspect of the contest was that Kim Chizevsky, former Ms. Olympia bodybuilding champion, placed sixth. No offense meant to Kim - who was driven out of bodybuilding into fitness by the imposition of the dastardly IFBB "guidelines" that all but destroyed the sport for close to a year - but you have to question exactly how the judges arrived at this placing. Even though Kim has lost a tremendous amount of body weight, she STILL looks like a bodybuilder. She could probably have placed well at the Ms. International. This is especially significant since the reason many judges have given for placing pro fitness competitor Lena Johannesen lower in competition than many think she deserves is that "she looks too much like a bodybuilder." So what we have here is not a double standard - but a standard that seems to be doubling back on itself and twisting around like a pretzel.
Kim's performance routine was respectable. She certainly didn't make a fool of herself and you could tell she had gymnastics training in the past. But she is too big, too tall and too long away from gymnastics to perform to the level of a Jenny or Kelly. In fact, she managed to get sixth after turning in the next to lowest score in the performance round (but still beating National Champion Beth Horn - welcome to the Twilight Zone). So how did this happen? It seems pretty clear that the motivation on the part of the judging panel was political. Placing Kim in the top six was a way of justifying having driven her out of a sport where she was the top champion of all time and, at the same time, rewarding her for going quietly and not making a fuss - or filing a lawsuit.
After the show, Kim was completely aware of what was going on with the judging. "My aim in going into fitness was to promote myself and my career," she said. "If the judges want to give me sixth, which helps with that promotion, that's fine with me." Her sixth place will also help Kim retain her contract with Weider - which is small compensation for having to quit a sport at which she was the all-time best, but at least its something.
However, the Fitness International itself was a successful event, with a popular winner, well attended (the Friday night fitness and bodybuilding contests were sold out - so much for there not being an audience for female physique). It will be interesting to see what happens to the level of development of fitness women if and when the IFBB decides to sanction "figure" contests as the NPC is intending to do. Since a figure contest is nothing more than a specialized beauty contest, will the fitness competitors be allowed to develop a little bit more muscle in order to please the audience, which is made up almost entirely of physique fans? Many of the fitness women are certainly training and dieting as if they were bodybuilders. And when fitness was first proposed, it was talked about as a kind of "junior bodybuilding," for women with muscles but not develop to the extreme.
The fitness women seem to be going in that direction to some degree on their own. So it will be interesting to see what happens.