Written by Peter McGough
04 December 2014

14challengeround

The Challenge Round

"Bodybuildings Worst Ever Idea" was mine

 

Earlier this year forum stalwart bigmikecox started a thread calling The Challenge Round that was used at the 2004 Mr. Olympia “Bodybuilding’s worst ever idea.” Well yours truly was the one responsible for launching the challenge round. It came into being in 2004 when America Media Inc (AMI), who a year earlier had bought all the Weider titles, entered into a co-partnership with the IFBB to promote Joe Weider’s Olympia Weekend. With this radical overhauling of the premier bodybuilding event on the calendar there was a mood of freshness and thoughts of how the event could be more attractive and exciting. Thus in that atmosphere of change The Challenge Round was incubated.

 THE CHALLENGE OF THE CHALLENGE ROUND

 Suspense. Remember that word. The first Mr. Olympia I ever saw live was the 18th rendition: the1982 event in London. At the end of the evening the top six, Chris Dickerson, Frank Zane, Casey Viator, Samir Bannout, Albert Beckles and Tom Platz came out. Together they went through the mandatory poses, then broke into a free-for all posedown and when that was complete they stood in line to hear their placings announced from six on up.

Previous to 2004 the last Olympia I had seen was the 39th rendition: the 2003 event in Las Vegas. At the end of the evening the 1982 format was repeated. Twenty-two Olympias had taken place between 1982 and 2003 and the script, save for the names of the participants, was unchanged. Kick in the fact that since 1984 only three men Lee Haney, Dorian Yates, and Ronnie Coleman, had been crowned Mr. Olympia, and the cold reality is that the procedure to judge the best built man on the planet could be subtitled Groundhog Day. As Alfred Hitchcock (now there’s a guy who knew Vertigo and where not to go) would be the first to tell you, the element missing is, Suspense, old boy.

I felt the format of the contest needed to be overhauled. Suspense, excitement, a game strategy aspect, audience interaction, razzmatazz befitting the Las Vegas locale it was being staged in, needed to be added to the Mr. Olympia contest. But how to give bodybuilding’s grand old man, a facelift and prove that fresh life can begin at 40?

Back in the late ‘80s when I lived in the UK I was press officer for the English Federation of Bodybuilders (EFBB) whose President at the time was Dr. Julian Feinstein. One day he floated the idea of adding some excitement to the posedown segment of a contest by allowing each finalist to challenge someone else in the line-up to a certain pose. That challenge wouldn’t be scored separately but it leant a confrontational aspect to competition. Feinstein’s idea was never put into practice, but it lay dormant in my head for years.

Thus when AMI became 50% partners with the IFBB in the Olympia Weekend, there was a chance to develop the Challenge Round idea. I was Editor in Chief at FLEX at the time and my boss Vince Scalisi went for it, Jim Manion head of the IFBB Pro League agreed to it, as did Olympia promoter Robin Chang. We quickly decided that an electronic scoreboard showing the audience how competitors were faring had to be part of the production. Vince brought in his long time friend, David Zelon, who had promoted past USA Championships and the ESPN live broadcast of the 1991 Ms. Olympia, before becoming a Hollywood producer. David took over all the technicalities concerning the scoreboard and worked tirelessly to modify, improve and finesse the system.

David, Vince, Jim, Robin and I had many discussions about how we would score the Challenge Round and the following was eventually agreed upon. First of all the most muscular was introduced as the eighth and final pose of the mandatories.

SCORING REVAMPED

 The afternoon prejudging would remain unchanged with individual mandatory posing followed by symmetry and mandatory comparisons. By the time of the evening finals the giant digital scoreboard would dominate the stage. As each competitor came out to do his posing routine, his scores from the afternoon would be announced and then flashed onto the scoreboard. As the athletes continued to pose, the audience would be able to track how each athlete is doing and enable them to witness the progress of the contest, and the standings of the competitors, in real time. Previously the audience had to wait right to evening’s end to see who finished where, under this system they can track the contest as it happens and vent their approval or otherwise.

After the posing round the athletes would be brought back onstage and their posing round scores will be given and shown on the scoreboard. In a tight contest placings will change either at the top or further down, and the audience and athletes will be able to witness these changes as they happen. Instead of the audience wondering whether the champions’ crown was in jeopardy or not, they would be fully cognizant of the situation at the start of the evening.

After the posing scores have been shown, the top ten will be announced and then that group will be whittled down to the final six. This is where it gets really interesting with an innovation that constitutes the most radical change in the history of bodybuilding contests, the Challenge Round.

GAME CHANGER

 As the final six remain onstage the scoreboard would show the standings of the athletes 1 through 6. But instead of the accumulated scores from the previous three rounds being shown, the scoring will be completely revamped. The first placed athlete would be awarded six points, the second five points, and so on down to the sixth placed athlete who will be awarded one point. What happened next took bodybuilding into a combative mano-a-mano arena it has not previously witnessed.

 Each competitor, starting with the sixth placed athlete had to call one individual pose of his choice against the other finalists. Each one of those poses counts as two points to the winner of the pose. Now here’s where the excitement mounts. The 11 judges will be holding electronic devices which connect them to the scoreboard, and immediately each pose is completed, they will press the devices to choose the winner of the pose and their decision will be flashed onto the scoreboard. For example in a competitor A vs. B challenge splits the judges 7 to 4 in favor of A that result will be shown on the scoreboard, and then two points added to A’s total. The audience will watch all this live and be able to voice their accord or disagreement with the results of each individual pose.

One caveat was that an athlete could only call a particular pose twice. For example, Ronnie Coleman’s best pose is probably back double biceps, but he would only be able to use it twice. This is where strategy comes in: would he use his strongest pose against the lower placed athletes or save it for the top two guys in pursuit of points? It would be a case of an athlete assessing the weakness of the other guys and then deciding which pose would cause the biggest damage to each of his rivals. Thus strategy became part of bodybuilding competition.

Whatever the permutations, the bottom line is that as the contest winds it way to its climax, one can see, via the scoreboard, the precise point at which the eventual champion took an unassailable lead; the snap shot moment – as it where –when he crossed the finishing line, when the winning point was scored. This as against the standard procedure of six guys waiting in line to learn their placings, which has been decided some time earlier. With the Challenge Round you watch the win being earned in real as-it-happens time

The premises was that the determination of the event would be much more spectator-friendly and dramatic. The audience will be fully aware of how the contest is unfolding, as they witness placings and fortunes change. Just as they would if they were courtside at an LA Lakers match. My feeling was that such entertainment and involvement is only right for die-hard fans that spend hundreds of dollars for tickets plus hotel and flight charges. We had to make the contest compelling for its supporters; they deserved that consideration.

BEHOLD THE CHALLENGE ROUND

So come the night of October 30, 2004 at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas, the 6,000 in attendance settled down for the challenge round. This is how it played out.

The final six and their points prior to the challenge round were:

6th: Gunter Schlierkamp -- 1 point

5th: Markus Ruhl – 2 points

4th: Gustavo Badell – 3 points

3rd: Dexter Jackson – 4 points

2nd: Jay Cutler – 5 points

1st: Ronnie Coleman – 6 points

 Schlierkamp called his five poses against the other finalists and lost all of them. Ruhl called his five poses and won against Schlierkamp, Badell and Jackson, but lost against Cutler and Coleman. Badell in his five challenges beat Schlierkamp, Ruhl and Jackson but lost against Cutler and Coleman. Jackson in his five beat Schlierkamp and Ruhl but lost against Badell, Cutler and Coleman. Cutler is next and he beats all five opponents. Against Coleman, strategy really came into play as he chose his best pose abs and thighs, which is probably Ronnie’s weakest.

All through the challenge round the crowd got into it like no Olympia crowd before, rooting for their favorites, booing if they disagreed. As Coleman stepped forward to call his five poses the Arena was reaching pandemonium levels. The audience could see on the scoreboard that Jay had 21 points while Ronnie had 14 points. The assembled throng quickly did the math and realized that to win Ronnie had to take all of his five poses, his last challenge being against Jay. The scene was set for the most exciting and noisiest ever conclusion to a Mr. Olympia contest.

Ronnie won his first four challenges. Cutler came forward to learn what pose Ronnie would choose against him. The scoreboard showed that the defending champ had amassed 22 points while Jay Cutler had 21. Emcee Triple H announced that the final pose of the evening would determine who would be the 2004 Mr. Olympia. It would either be Cutler edging it by 23 to 22 or Coleman winning 24 to 21. One last pose, for all the marbles: with the audience knowing immediately whether Ronnie had won his seventh Sandow or Cutler his first. Bodybuilding had never known such a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all, nail biting climax. By now the audience is screaming.

Most guessed that Big Ron had it in the bag. The Challenge Round rules state that competitors are not allowed to call the same shot twice. Coleman had only called his killer pose, rear double biceps once and it now had Cutler’s name written on it. In previous years Coleman could have also called upon the rear lat spread to see off his perennial rival. In 2004 though Cutler underwent a massive expansion and the overall mass if not the detail of his back had reached a point where it would not be blitzed by Coleman’s back lat spread.

“What’s it gonna be Big Man?” Triple H inquired. “Rear lat lights out game over spread,” the reigning champ replied. Many in attendance immediately realized the tactical error Coleman had made. Could he win the pose? He could, but his choice of pose meant it was not the guaranteed game over shot that would have been the case if he had chosen back double biceps.

At the buzzer, Cutler spread his lats instantaneously. They flared like the proverbial cobras hood casting a dark shadow across the stage. Coleman was slow off the draw. Five seconds elapse and the champ is still in the midst of unraveling his meaty wings. He hasn’t quite hit the pose fully, hasn’t straightened out of the forward lean bodybuilders employ to exaggerate the illusion of growth that comes with a rear lat spread. When he finally hits the shot it is majestic.

By this time the audience is at fever pitch level screaming for Jay and Ronnie in equal measure. Someone yells, “Ain’t nothing but a peanut.” Personally I’ve never seen a bodybuilding audience so animated, so noisy, so bloody connected.

And then it happened; the judges pressed their devices, and the scoreboard signaled that Ronnie had won the pose, and thereby instantaneously informed the audience that the Texas juggernaut had won his seventh title. At that point Arnold Schwarzenegger entered center stage and awarded Ronnie the Sandow. The audience were on their feet applauding and at the same time tried to kick back from an emotional high, having in the previous 25 minutes watched the most electrically charged Olympia ever.

THE CHALLENGE IS OVER

 Read the last sentence again and you’re probably asking why the Challenge Round was never repeated? Oh, it did make a final appearance in 2005, but only as a sideshow. It was a completely different segment that didn’t count in any way toward the scoring of the Olympia. It carried a $25,000 prize, which was won by Gustavo Badell. Yes he beat Coleman and Cutler in that round judged by former Mr. Olympias. And perhaps Badell winning that year’s Challenge Round, while being adjudged third in the Olympia, goes part way to explaining the demise of the round.

In 2004 the feeling was that Coleman deserved to win the title but only did so by the skin of his teeth. For many it seemed too precarious a system to decide a bodybuilding contest. And it has to be said the bodybuilders themselves didn’t like it. They argued that it didn’t make sense to just erase the scores from the prejudging and basically start from scratch, which meant someone in the lead could be caught. I would argue that in sports like Olympic running you have to qualify via heats and a semi-final and whatever you did to get to the final counts for naught once you are there.

The Challenge Round in my view gave the paying spectators a chance to witness in real time what was happening. And yes it gave greater opportunity for an upset to occur. And isn’t the prospect of an upset, a David beating Goliath, an element that draws us to sport? Like as when Superbowl no-hopers triumph as the Jets did in 1969, or as when 42-1 underdog Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson, or as at 1980’s The Miracle on Ice when the USA beat the Soviet Union ice hockey team. With all the recent talk (as in NBC broadcasting the Olympia) about taking the sport to a wider audience wouldn’t newcomers more easily follow the progress and outcome of a bodybuilding contest under the Challenge Round system. As it stands they would not understand it and find it boring, as most bodybuilding fans do. Ah, well I put that soapbox away nine years ago but like my dream about Heidi Klum, it was good, and a challenge, while it lasted.

 

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