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Gut Check

© Adam Hughes

Somewhere on the beaches of Valhalla, Steve Reeves is hitting his abdominal vacuum pose and smiling down on Earth, circa 2005. In Trinidad, Darrem Charles is smiling coyly at himself in the mirror as his wife clears the mantel for the Sandow statuette he is destined to collect this fall. And in Texas, Ronnie Coleman is dusting off his service revolver and squad car, preparing to cover his unsightly physique with the Arlington blue once again. You see, by IFBB decree, "ugly" physiques will no longer be rewarded come contest day. Sure, bring us your distended stomachs, synthol-filled shoulders, and huddled masses, but don't expect them to walk away with any hardware. Bodybuilding is about aesthetics, says the IFBB, and the judging criteria is going to be enforced so as to better reflect this ideal. Don't believe it? Just look at the results of the late Spring shows.

Witness Charles strutting to victory in the New York and Toronto pro shows, his lithe musculature felling all challengers, large and small. See the diminutive Lee Priest triumphantly return to his homeland to take the Australian Grand Prix. Couple these developments with Dexter Jackson's early-season win at the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic in Columbus, OH, and the trend is clear: The judges really are rewarding the tighter, more aesthetically pleasing physiques and vanquishing the beefier behemoths to the pastures where they belong.

Of course, the problem with evaluating judging standards based on these shows is that the context is skewed at best. Specifically, these contests were utterly devoid of the huge men who usually place near the top in any show they enter: Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, Gunter Schlierkamp, Markus Ruhl, etc. In fact the only man who entered any of these Spring shows who might be considered a frontrunner and also might be considered to be "too big" or less than aesthetically pleasing is Gustavo Badell, who really has grown a prodigious belly in the last year or so. Even though Badell placed behind the shapelier Jackson and Chris Cormier at the Arnold Classic, he finished ahead of Charles, Priest, and Melvin Anthony, all of whom presumably better represent the "ideal" of professional bodybuilding.

No, the real litmus test for these "new" standards will come in October, when bodybuilding's elite competitors rumble onstage at the Mr. Olympia contest in Las Vegas. If, for instance, Darrem Charles ends up in the Challenge Round and takes out a huffing and puffing, over-300-pound Coleman in the abs and thigh shot, then maybe we really are seeing a paradigm shift. More than likely, however, the Challenge Round will work out so that Cutler and Coleman are once again throwing down the last posing gauntlet in a winner-takes-all back shot, in which, of course, Coleman will prevail. After all, bodybuilding is subjective, and "personal preference" has historically been a great place to sweep away the flouting of rules and whispers of politics.