The IFBB Ms. Olympia contest has been rescheduled and will be held in New Jersey on October 2nd. However, as of September 9th, 1999, one month before it was due to be held at the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California, we were told that the event – for the first time in its 20 year history – would be cancelled. According to Wayne Demilia, who runs pro bodybuilding for the International Federation of Bodybuilders, the reason was financial. The promoter, Jarka Kastnerova, who promoted the 1998 Ms. Olympia successfully in Prague, Czech Republic, pulled out because she had sold only 43 tickets for the event.

Apparently, trying to hold the competition in Los Angeles at that venue was a doomed venture from the start. Jon Lindsey, who promotes many bodybuilding and fitness contests in Southern California, said in a phone interview, "If I thought the Ms. Olympia could be successfully promoted in Los Angeles, I would have done it myself. I never talked to Jarka, but if I had I would have told her that finding sponsors for the show would be extremely difficult and that the Santa Monica Civic is much too expensive a venue to use for the contest. I would have recommended the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, where a number of contests including the Iron Man are held every year."

Wayne Demilia says that Jarka Kastnerova’s financial difficulties came as something of a surprise to the IFBB, or else arrangements would have been made to reschedule the event. However, this is difficult to believe, since most people in the industry were aware of these problems months earlier. Since the contest is billed as JOE WEIDER’S Ms. Olympia, and the contest is the IFBB’s world championship for professionals, you would think the federation would pull out all stops to insure this event would not be cancelled. So the logical conclusion has to be that this is a situation the IFBB WANTED to happen - or at least didn't object to with sufficient energy. Imagine what would have happened if this had been the Mr. Olympia!

This problem regarding the Ms. Olympia, and the apparent sea-change taking place in the sport, seems to indicate that we will not see "business as usual" in the future as pertains to bodybuilding for women. Indeed, Wayne Demilia has announced that "the plan is to restructure the Ms. Olympia and women’s bodybuilding in general." Does this mean the IFBB will no longer be sanctioning pro bodybuilding for women? That has apparently been the subject of debate and discussion.

Why would the IFBB even CONSIDER such a thing? Why kill the golden goose, even if it is not laying a whole lot of eggs just at present? To understand, it is necessary to take a look at the evolution of the sport over the past twenty years. The IFBB began sanctioning bodybuilding for women in 1980, which was the first year of the Ms. Olympia contest. The first star to emerge from the new sport was Rachel McLish. Rachel was a sensual package of looks, physique and charisma and was incredibly photogenic. Her visibility as a female bodybuilding champion did a great deal to promote the whole idea of bodybuilding for women.

There were a number of highly attractive women in the sport back in the early 1980s, and their level of muscular development was still low enough so as "not to scare off the civilians." Besides, women’s bodybuilding was new. The media thrive on novelty so every magazine and television show took turns featuring female physique competitors, and most coverage was generally positive.

The next big star in women’s pro bodybuilding was Cory Everson. Cory’s All-American, athletic looks and her shapely body attracted a lot of fans who often didn’t realize how big she actually was. "I don’t like those big women, I prefer somebody like Cory Everson," somebody said to me, not realizing that Cory was the BIGGEST competitor on the Ms. Olympia stage. When powerlifter Bev Francis first got seriously into bodybuilding contest, and was viewed as being almost monstrously muscular, Cory outweighed her by 10 pounds or more in competition shape.

After Cory came Lenda Murray who set new standards for symmetry and aesthetics. Lenda was kind of a female Flex Wheeler, with wide shoulders, flowing lats, beautifully shaped muscles overall, and a tiny waist and joints. Lenda was also gorgeous and had a winning personality on stage and off. She was terrific on television. Like Rachel and Cory before her, she won over a lot of fans to the sport of women’s bodybuilding.

However, during this period the women continued to get bigger, denser and more muscular. Their muscle separations deepened. They started to develop the same kind of incredible "hardness" that characterizes the male bodybuilding physique. But as long as the female champions were "cover model" material, few objected. But in 1996, Lenda was defeated at the Ms. Olympia by Kim Chizevsky, who raised the standard for hardness and muscularity to an awesome degree. Lenda had the superior shape, but she looked soft and out of shape standing next to Kim, who might as well have been made out of bronze. A quantum leap had been taken, and this spelled trouble for women’s bodybuilding.

Kim Chizevsky was the first Ms. Olympia who did not have the kind of looks likely to be featured on the cover of Muscle & Fitness. This doesn’t mean she is ugly. Kim is a perfectly nice looking female athlete. But the female stars who proceeded her all had strikingly good looks – Not just Rachel, Cory and Lenda but others like Kike Elomaa, Carla Dunlap, Marjo Selin, Anja Langer, Anja Schreiner and many more. Bev Francis had drawn a lot of heat for not being "feminine" enough (which she answered by giving birth to two children, how’s that for feminine?). But she had never won the Ms. Olympia, so it was almost as if she had cast as the "bad guy," as in a pro wrestling scenario.

The problem is this: Everybody loves kittens but not everybody likes cats. Kim Chizevsky came along like a tiger let loose among housecats. She was not only bigger and harder than most people were willing to accept, she set a standard for size and hardness that all the other competitors immediately set out to equal. It took a year or two, but at the ’98 Ms. Olympia in Prague, while Kim was praised for having improved her overall aesthetics (her face wasn’t as deeply lined and she looked "prettier") others on stage like Vicky Gates and Andrulla Blanchette just about matched her in density and hardness. That seemingly "insurmountable gap" had been closed in a period of only two years!

But in the past two or three years there has also been a considerable change in the magazine coverage of female bodybuilding. MuscleMag International and Iron Man have given "hardcore" female bodybuilding virtually no coverage at all. Flex Magazine, supposedly the official journal of the IFBB, has paid them only scant attention. Instead, the magazines have been full of photos of fitness competitors, and most of those pictures have been of the T&A variety – swimsuit and lingerie layouts, lots of barely-covered silicon and shapely behinds in thongs. In fact, it is ironic that over the past several years the fitness competitors have gotten more and more muscular, looking like bodybuilders from a decade earlier, but when you see their pictures in the magazines little of this is evident. They might as well be Hawaiian Tropic girls, as little muscle as is evident.

As this trend continued, the IFBB seemed to make no effort to counter it. "Women’s bodybuilding is dying," everyone kept hearing, and this was never contradicted by the federation, even though the audiences for the contests continued to show up and buy tickets – which was not true for the fitness contests, which people enjoy but aren’t motivated to actually pay to see. The significant lack of promotion for pro women’s bodybuilding by Flex Magazine also sent a very clear signal: The IFBB is withdrawing its support of the sport.

Why would they do this? After all, the federation KNOWS there is an audience out there for female bodybuilding – lack of ticket sales for the Santa Monica show notwithstanding. One answer was flashing all over the Internet the day after the cancellation of the Ms. Olympia. As with so many things Web-related, it’s hard to pin down the original source. "Joe Weider said…" or "Wayne Demilia said…" or somebody else said. But the gist of it is this: It is reported that Ben Weider is desperate to get bodybuilding included in the Olympic Games. But the IOC members, he believes, don’t like the "big women." So to make bodybuilding more attractive to the Olympics, Weider has decided to drop women’s pro bodybuilding entirely – or at least not allow it to continue under IFBB sanction.

Of course, with all the drug testing involved, it is not likely pro bodybuilders would compete in the Olympics anyway, if and when the sport is ever accepted into the games. Besides, the participants in the Olympics are national teams, and pro bodybuilding is international. The IFBB on an amateur level is an organization of national sanctioning bodies worldwide, so that is where the competitors would probably be drawn from – the same bodybuilders who currently compete in the IFBB World Amateur Championships for men and for women.

But the question of anabolic drugs comes up a lot and has to be addressed. In the early years, opponents of women’s bodybuilding preached that women "shouldn’t" develop muscle. It was "unnatural." Not "feminine." But as the women continued to get bigger, a new mantra appeared. Women "can’t" get that big, it was assumed. They have no genetics for it. There is no way they could be gaining that much size and hardness without drugs. Not only that, but these drugs, it was believed, don’t just "enhance" development – they are PRIMARILY responsible for it. That is, the development of the pro female bodybuilder was seen as almost entirely the product of anabolic drug use and it was assumed they would look nothing like that without chemical help.

This is, of course, nonsense. There is no doubt that anabolic drug use is prevalent in a lot of sports, including bodybuilding. The IFBB tested both men and women for steroids some years ago, but the process is expensive and time consuming. Competitors don’t show up to an event until a day or two before, so that drug tests results can’t be obtained until after the contest is decided and the winner is announced. When the (male) winner failed a drug test at the Arnold Classic a few years ago, it causes all sorts of problems – including cancellation of television coverage by NPC…permanently, it turned out. So testing for steroids was eliminated.

However, research demonstrates that anabolic drugs like steroids give only a small percentage gain to the bodybuilding physique. This has never been measured in bodybuilders per se –although the actual experience of bodybuilders tends to bear this out - but powerlifters have been shown to achieve less than a 20% increase in performance (and some of this due to the placebo effect) in non-tested competition compared to meets that are drug tested, and it seems that the longer the powerlifter has been training, the more mature the lifter is, the LESS relative benefit he gets from using steroids – often as little as 10%. That is, the drugs help close the gap between performance and potential, but they don’t actually change the degree of genetically given potential. So even if bodybuilders are benefiting in their development by a full 20%, this means 80% if what they achieve is "natural." And if mature bodybuilders, who have been training for decades (which includes most of the pros) only see about a 10% increase, this means 90% of their size and muscularity is due to genetics, hard training, consistency and good diet – and not drugs.

There is no research to indicate that this percentage of increase is any different for women than for men or that anabolic drugs give women significantly greater benefits than males. Steroids, for example, are simply synthetic analogs of testosterone. Men have about 100 times the amount of testosterone in their bodies as do women; they are not 100 times bigger or more muscular and women who take male hormones do not develop muscles 100 times larger. There are a lot more physiological and biochemical factors governing the development of muscle than just hormones.

In spite of these facts, many in the IFBB give "drugs" as the main reason to criticize pro bodybuilding for women. Not only that, but for anyone really familiar with bodybuilding it is apparent that drug usage among women is likely only a fraction of what it is for the men. If the IFBB is so concerned about drugs, it should have instituted a full program of drug testing long ago – and damn the difficulties and expensive. How fair is it to say, "We are not going to drug test, but we are simply going to ASSUME you are using and abusing anabolic drugs."

However, there are other reasons the IFBB has been reluctant to implement drug tests – and why other organizations should also be hesitant. Testing at contests simply indicates the competitors are clean enough THAT DAY to pass the tests. It says nothing about what the competitors may have been using in the past or plan to use in the future. Many past the tests by taking the type of steroids that pass out of the body more rapidly. Usually, orals rather than injectables. But these are generally the most toxic and dangerous forms of these drugs, the ones most likely to cause side-effect like liver damage. So you get competitors who are resorting to more dangerous drug programs in order to pass the tests, which are designed in the first place protect their health. Ironic, ain’t it?

Besides, when it comes to bodybuilding and steroids, everybody knows that 90% of steroid users would never be tested even if there were drug testing at the national and international level. Those users work out in gyms all over the world and most never compete at all or never make it up to a level where they would be likely to encounter testing. The "wannabes" frequently try to make up for their lack of talent by abusing drugs in a manner an experienced athletic competitor (from any sport) would never dream of.

Anyway, the whole debate is largely moot because it isn’t primarily steroids that account for the huge, hard, cut look that audiences see in the modern pro bodybuilder. There hasn’t been much advance in the development of new and better anabolic steroids over the years. No, the difference comes from competitors using substances like human growth hormone plus insulin, and from selectively taking water out from under the skin using sophisticated diuretics, while leaving the muscles full, hard and hydrated. In fact, the use of diuretics has become so prevalent, and these drugs are so potentially dangerous (much more so than anabolic steroids – one male bodybuilder actually died from using diuretics and a number have ended up in the hospital) that the IFBB has been testing for them at contests for a number of years. But the pros are clever. They look at the list of prohibited substances and then find use something not on the list. The experts analyze the tests, find out what new substances are being used that year and add them to next year’s list. The bodybuilders look over the list, find non-proscribed diuretics they can use, and so it goes, so it goes.

Understanding these factors makes it clear that women bodybuilders are not some kind of freakish monsters created by the wonders of modern chemistry. They are just bodybuilders, and the level of development they have achieved is the inevitable result of genetically talented females training seriously over an extended period of time. Understanding this makes it apparent that what bothers some people about female bodybuilders is how good they have become as bodybuilders – which is the whole point of the sport. They have just become too successful, too quickly. And as a result have become victims of their own success!

In fact, despite all the hoo ha, these women really aren’t all that big at all. Cory Everson and Lenda Murray both competed at something just under 150 pounds. Kim Chizevsky gets in shape at just over 160 pounds. After 10 years of evolution, to see body weight go up by a factor of less than 10 % is hardly earth shattering. In fact, according to Women's Physique World editor-in-chief Steve Wennerstrom, "People think women bodybuilders are bigger than they are, and they are often surprised to find that, in shape, they are usually smaller than the average overweight women. At her bodyweight, Kim is about the size of the average Olympic heptathlete, and most of the pros are smaller than she is." "Bodybuilding is illusion," said the late Vince Gironda, but not understanding this people have mistaken the illusion of how big female pro bodybuilders are for the reality.

Another way to look at this situation is by comparing the size of the women to the size of the men. While Ms. Olympia is around 160 pounds, Mr. Olympia is closer to 270 pounds! An INCREDIBLE difference in body size. The average man and woman differ in body size by only some 13%. So it is obvious that bodybuilding doesn’t make men and women more alike – it vastly exaggerates their differences!

This calls into serious question the IFBB's decision not to support pro bodybuilding for women. The sport has apparently become the victim of a nasty self-fulfilling prophecy and perhaps to the politics of international sport. In any event, they are getting a raw deal. Women’s bodybuilding will eventually recover and prosper. Real sports always do. Remember, women used to be forbidden from running distance events in the Olympics, and until Babe Zaharias came along, female tennis players were supposed to stick to a style of play that was dainty and feminine. Nowadays, women are boxers for chrissake. How "feminine" is that?

For anyone wanting to voice their opinion on the subject, you can contact the following:

Ben Weider
Weider Sports Equip. Ltd.
2875 Bates Rd.
Montreal, Canada H3S 1B7

Joe Weider
Weider Publications
21100 Erwin St.
Woodland Hills, CA 91367

Wayne Demilia
15 Culver Drive
New City, NY 10956

Peter McGough
Flex Magazine
21100 Erwin St.
Woodland Hills, CA 91367

Jim Manion
The National Physique Committee
212 9th St. 5th Floor
Pittsburgh, PA 15222

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