An egg is being hatched here in the Philadelphia Sheraton this weekend, and the assembled representatives of the bodybusiness, old and new, are watching with particular attention, and with an eye to what’s in it for them if the creature inside should happen to fly.
— Charles Gaines, “Pumping Iron II: The Unprecedented Woman”

That was the first Ms. Olympia contest in 1980, a landmark event signaling a commitment to inaugurate an annual coronation of the world’s ultimate female physique. Women’s bodybuilding was in its infancy then, as full of controversy as it is now. Yet the winner, Rachel McLish, and her rivals would get barely a second glance at a regional amateur competition today; even the fitness competitors are bigger! The 1981 Ms. Olympia was at the Philadelphia Sheraton too, and thereafter the show left town, never to return. Indeed, it did fly... to New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Prague and Las Vegas. Philly made no effort to fly it back.

In fact, other than a “Musclemania” show in Valley Forge in 1991, there’s been no major bodybuilding/fitness action in Philadelphia since. Sure, there’s Dr. Richard Brown’s well-run “Philly Classic,” and some minor local shows, but the big guns, the national-level competitions of the NPC (National Physique Committee, which is to amateur bodybuilding what the NCAA is to college sports) have steered clear. So have the international professional competitions. We’re fly-over country. And that’s a shame.

Rachel McLish, the first Ms. Olympia in 1980. It happened in Philly!

Not only is Philly the birthplace of the Ms. Olympia, but the city boasts a rich sports legacy of rough-and-tumble pro teams, boxers, fitness gurus (including Dr. Jim Corea, Pat Croce and Roger Schwab, who was a judge at the 1981 Ms. O), the Army-Navy game, the Penn Relays and a whole bunch of folks rowing up and down the Schuylkill. Plus zillions of colleges and high schools around here, all with robust sports programs. So what if nation was snickering at our Philly Phatness a year or so ago? We got over it. Gyms, now carefully marketed as “fitness centers” and “health clubs,” are multiplying at a dizzying rate, most of them jammed at peak hours. With all this jock-spiel going on, there’s a good case for bringing big-time bodybuilding and fitness competition back to Philly.

A digression: “So what? Who cares about bodybuilding? A bunch of drugged-up freaks, right?”

The detractors of bodybuilding are usually unimaginative, unoriginal and uninspired, their faces puckered from a surfeit of sour grapes. I delight in addressing their fatuousness as you might delight if you had Homer Simpson all to yourself. Inevitably these people purport to speak from a position of athletic seriousness, and go on to deride the extremes they’ve perceived from thumbing through magazines, mostly tired stereotypes about steroids, suspect sexual preferences and lack of flexibility. This serves to numb the detractors’ sense of inferiority. Take the somber and anorexic-looking woman at the 1999 WWDB Health & Fitness Fair, who couldn’t find anything nice to say about an 8 x 10” photo of Toni Norman, a lovely middleweight from Oklahoma, one of several bodybuilding women in my exhibit booth:

“It’s all drugs,” she sneered. “She looks like a man.”

“A man? You don’t think she’s beautiful?” I asked. This was old territory but I was loving the moment. This scrawny poster-girl for the abolition of tofu and excessive aerobics looked far more “manly” than Toni on her worst day. “I’ve been here for two days,” I told her, “and I haven’t seen anyone who even comes close.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty. But” — she pointed at Toni’s rope-like triceps. “Look at the arms. I’ve been training for years and I don’t have that! And her legs are huge!”

“She was onstage half an hour ago squatting 225 for 25 reps. And she eats like a horse. Been doing that for years? Or just soy milk and cardio?”

“Nope.” The woman was really torqued now. “But I don’t do drugs.”

“Neither does she. She’s an Oklahoma City Fire Department lieutenant and a paramedic. Gotta be squeaky clean. And she’s got two kids...”

But the woman didn’t stick around to hear me finish, allowing her subdued male companion to steer her away. She’d missed out here, lost an opportunity to use this vision of possibility for inspiration — to apply it to herself. She’d separated herself from that same possibility out of jealousy for it. Sort of like that “class-envy” thing, the way some people view the wealthy: “If they have more than I do, they must’ve done something illegal or immoral to get it.”

All these people filling the gyms... why are they there? The concept of “fitness” isn’t, of itself, particularly exciting unless you’re already a highly competitive athlete. Unless you’re engaged in an athletic activity, you can’t really see or measure fitness. No, it’s the visual changes most of us are after: lose fat, build muscle, look younger, harder, sexier. None dare call it “bodybuilding,” of course, even though that’s exactly what it is. But we all know about curls, squats, bench presses and all those weight-training exercises. We talk easily of “reps” and “sets,” of getting a “pump.” We eat differently now, spreading five or six nutritionally loaded meals across the day. We take creatine, “fat burners,” proteins and all that other stuff that we get from the local supplement stores without acknowledging that the bodybuilding world was doing these things long ago, long before you’d ever have seen an Olympic figure-skater like Michelle Kwan curling a dumbbell on the cover of Newsweek (Feb 18, 2002 issue!).

Once you’ve seen it, you can’t stop looking. None of us can. We’re seeing, as Charles Gaines (whose “Pumping Iron” introduced Arnold to the world) put it, “an idea made fact.” And it’s hard to forget what you’ve seen, because “normal” doesn’t look quite as satisfactory any more.

Karen Wainwright: Ms. Olympia, 1981, Philadelphia: “But the routine that brings down the house is done to the song “Endless Love” by a slender pretty black girl — a Philadelphia native named Karen Wainright whose husband, also a bodybuilder, had been shot and killed earlier in the week.” (Charles Gaines, “Pumping Iron II: The Unprecedented Woman)

You certainly won’t be seeing “normal” at the NPC Jr. USA Bodybuilding, Fitness and Figure Championships at the Adams Mark Hotel this April 27. Finally, national-level bodybuilding comes to Philly, and even though it’s not the USA or the Nationals, it’s a start. “We’re testing the waters here,” says Bob Bonham, owner of the Strong & Shapely Gym in Rutherford, NJ and an experienced contest promoter. “If we do well with this, we may look at bringing one of the big ones here in the future... perhaps even a pro show.”

Let’s hope it happens. Let’s make it happen! National and International contests bring a lot of visitors (hotels, restaurants and other businesses like that). A lot of media attention. A lot of excitement. And a lot of inspiration. But there’s more to it than the money and those other things. It’s a matter of pride; we’ve got to set things right. We let the Ms. Olympia fly away to other cities and with it, two decades of big-time bodybuilding. It’s time to fly it back.