Written by Peter McGough
11 September 2017

17olympia-untoldstory2004

The Untold Story - The 2004 Olympia: 13 Years After

 

A behind-the-scenes account of the machinations surrounding the reorganization of the 2004 Mr. Olympia, which changed the bodybuilding landscape forever. How that happened; how the Challenge Round was created and gave the battle for that year’s Sandow the most unique and exciting conclusion in its history. And why it was never repeated.

 

 

Editor’s Note: Peter McGough worked for Weider Publications from 1991 through 2008, becoming editor of FLEX in 1997 and then also editor of Muscle & Fitness and Muscle & Fitness Hers in 2005. He was in a unique position to observe and take part in the company’s development and transition to new ownership in 2002. Exclusively in Muscular Development, Peter tells of that change and the run-up to the 2004 Mr. Olympia contest.

 

RUMBLINGS IN WEIDERLAND

In November 2002, American Media Inc. (AMI), publisher of the National Enquirer and a host of other titles, bought Weider Publications, publisher of Muscle & Fitness, FLEX, Shape and Men’s Fitness, for $350 million. Meaning that Joe Weider’s 1940 $7 investment had multiplied 50 million times over 62 years.

As 2003 began turning into 2004, David Pecker, AMI’s CEO, was keen to get involved in the contest side of things and he is a man who believes in starting at the top. He wanted his company to be part of the biggest, most prestigious, bodybuilding contest on the calendar. Namely the Mr. Olympia, which although created by Joe Weider, had no direct financial connection to Weider Publishing. Instead it was under the auspices of the International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB) whose president was Joe’s brother, Ben, with IFBB Vice President Wayne DeMilia being responsible for the organization’s pro division. DeMilia was also the promoter of the Mr. Olympia contest.

In the spring of 2004, David Pecker and Ben Weider were in talks for AMI to buy a 50 percent share in the Mr. Olympia contest. Pecker was also lining up the appointment of Arnold Schwarzenegger (the sport’s number one icon and recently elected Governor of California) as executive editor of Muscle & Fitness and FLEX, which was finally publically announced with much fanfare at that year’s Arnold Classic in Columbus on March 6.

During that same period, relations had become strained between Ben Weider and DeMilia, and the latter had thoughts of his own. Thoughts that extended to him starting his own pro division and taking control of the Olympia.

I talked to all the aforementioned parties during this time as well as NPC Chairman Jim Manion, who called regularly to discuss what was developing. DeMilia seemed to have it in his mind that he would go into partnership with AMI to own the Olympia and thus he pressed on for plans to launch his own federation, which he was confident all pro bodybuilders, promoters and officials would join.

 

HITTING THE FAN

The unmentionable matter hit the air-cooling device in Orlando on April 30 when at the athletes’ meeting before the Florida Pro Xtreme Challenge, which would take place the next day, DeMilia made a stunning announcement. He was disassociating the current pro division from the IFBB and forming his own federation. He would lead this new organization, named Pro Division Inc. (PDI) and he anticipated all pro bodybuilders, promoters and officials would join. The speech, quite lengthy and scathing in its content, was recorded by FLEX writer Greg Merritt, who was present at the meeting. Thirty minutes after DeMilia’s bombshell announcement, I was reading a transcript of the speech in Weider’s Los Angeles headquarters. There was no immediate riposte from Ben Weider or AMI.

In a storyline that could have been scripted by Stephen King, DeMilia was promoting his annual Night of Champions contest at the City Center Theater in Manhattan on May 22, and it was here he would launch his new division. During the three-week period between the Orlando and New York shows, the IFBB and AMI solidified their joint venture and so on Friday, May 21, they announced the restructuring while also stating that DeMilia no longer had any official capacity within the IFBB or any connection with any of its events. Jim Manion would become head of the IFBB Professional League. I was in New York for the Night of Champions, and given the fast-moving developments a strange atmosphere surrounded the event, which still went ahead. Backstage expeditors, and even some of the judges, wore PDI T-shirts.

DeMilia, long noted for bringing showbiz elements to his contests, promised PDI events would be even more entertaining. We saw what “entertaining” meant at the opening of the show. It meant Denise Masino and Dayana Cadeau scantily dressed in leather bondage-type outfits, playing out a sexually charged bad girl/prison guard scenario; Rodney St. Cloud doing a strip act egged on by a groping Dayana and Denise;Kenny Jones doing his Michael Jackson act, then intimating he wanted to go home with a small boy who wandered onstage. The whole segment elicited boos from the audience, and seemed to sum up the future of the PDI, which held a couple of more contests in New York and London later in the year before being consigned to history.

 

ROLLING THE VEGAS DICE

So that’s how the management of the Olympia Weekend was restructured. All that was left now was to organize the 2004 event, slated for October 28th through October 30th at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, from scratch in five months.

Initially my boss, Vince Scalisi, editorial director of Weider Publications, and myself started to do all the groundwork for the event while fulfilling our usual magazine duties and reported to David Pecker on a weekly basis. In July, Robin Chang was hired as director of AMI events and worked full time on organizing the Olympia. Without Robin being hired, I don’t know how we could have put the whole thing together.

David Pecker made a public announcement that he would work toward making the prize money for Olympia athletes total $1 million. For the 2004 Olympia weekend, the total prize money was $420,000 (with $120,000 going to the Mr. Olympia winner); in 2013, the total prize money was $1 million and in 2014 it was $1.1 million, with $275,000 going to the Mr. Olympia. As far as the Expo is concerned, the 2004 rendition had just fewer than 200 booths, while 1,100 booths were on display 10 years later.

It must be said that David Pecker spearheaded the campaign to publicize the 2004 Olympia Weekend to the widest possible audience, and reach areas it had never reached before. Therefore, FLEX stepped up its number of Olympia-related features; Muscle & Fitness (which for a few years previously had curtailed Olympia coverage) began running Olympia stories and for the first time ever, Men’s Fitness ran Olympia promos and advertisements. Even wider was the participation of the National Enquirer, The Star and The Globe, which ran Olympia-driven content. The visual culmination of the publicity campaign was a 120-foot by 30-foot billboard advertising the 2004 Olympia being on display in New York’s Time Square for a month before the contest. Bodybuilding had never been so mainstream.

But the biggest innovation was the introduction of the Challenge Round, which would actually decide who won that year’s Mr. Olympia title. (An explanation of the Challenge Round’s format will follow in due course, but first here’s how it came into being.)

 

THE CHALLENGE OF THE CHALLENGE ROUND

Suspense. Remember that word. The first Mr. Olympia I ever saw live was the 18th rendition: the 1982 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 that the format of the contest needed to be overhauled. Suspense, excitement, 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 U.K., 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 lineup 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 percent partners with the IFBB in the Olympia Weekend, there was a chance to develop the Challenge Round idea. My boss Vince Scalisi went for it and Jim Manion, head of the IFBB Professional League, agreed to it. 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 longtime 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 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 mandatoriues.

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 will be announced and then flashed onto the scoreboard. As the athletes continue to pose, the audience will be able to track how each athlete is doing and enable them to witness the progress of the contest 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 champion’s 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 10 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.

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 that connect them to the scoreboard, and immediately after 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, if 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.

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 snapshot moment, as it where— when he crossed the finishing line, when the winning point was scored. This was 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 determination of the event will 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 Los Angles Lakers match. My feeling was that such entertainment and involvement is only right for diehard 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 settles down for the Challenge Round. This is how it played out.

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

Sixth:                Gunter Schlierkamp – 1 point

Fifth:                Markus Ruhl – 2 points

Fourth:              Gustavo Badell – 3 points

Third:                Dexter Jackson – 4 points

Second:            Jay Cutler – 5 points

First:                 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 for Cutler 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 the 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 fend 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 equaled Coleman’s.

“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 cobra’s hood, casting a dark shadow across the stage. Coleman is 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 applauded 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 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 partway 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 semifinal, 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. But isn’t the prospect of an upset, a David beating Goliath, an element that draws us to sport? Ah well, like my dream about Heidi Klum, it was good while it lasted.

 

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