The competition has been talked about as a Arnold v. Mentzer show, and that Mike was robbed, I can’t see that.
I have it 1) Boyer Coe 2) Chris Dickerson 3) Frank Zane 4) Mike Mentzer and 5) Arnold
1 and 2 are up in the air in my opinion, and Zane looked far better in the evening part of the show than he did early on, in fact he looked very small in the first part.
Mentzer looks impressive, but not better than the my top 3, Arnold did not look good at all, partly I think from having seen him bigger, you expect things to happen when he flexes that simply do not when he is smaller.
The question is would the Olympia be weaker if the dynasties weren’t so desperately chased.
I understand there is a brand to protect and there is an incredibly disproportionate amount of cocksuckers who compete is this sport. Plus to get to the top level of anything you probably need a fair ego plus some of the shit these guys take can make them a bit unpredictable. Not to mention the lengths some go to to keep the cash rolling in.
But it definitely seems to go way beyond that as its hard to make that argument for the likes of Dexter or early days Jay.
So what benefit do these dynasties bring and what is thr big deal about a guy coming in great shape and then screwing things up after it?
Anyways, it really is not appropriate to think of Olympia title holders as dynasty chasers, in my view, we are talking about their jobs, and if you are gunna do a job like this where it clearly pays more to be the best, and you really are not doing a whole lot with your time anyways, you might as well go for it.
I can think of a number of years where the winner should not have won: 1980, 81, 1990, 2000, 2002, 2007.
Some of them I attribute to things outside the IFBB choices, Arnold when he won the show above picked the judges, because until 2 days before, no one knew he was going in the show. Word is that Joe Weider was very infuriated about the final result, same the next year, he was upset.
1990 I kinda understand what happened, this was the first show (and only) where it was drug-tested, and if you own any of the magazines from the time you were constantly reading how they were natural (even before the testing), so if the champ suddenly got beat when they started testing, it would make the entire organization, perhaps sport look bad, in the wake of Ben Johnson’s positive test in 1988.
That same year Shawn Ray lost his Arnold trophy to Mike Ashley after having tested positive.
But you must remember how hard the IFBB was working in the early 2000’s to try to make the judging more transparent. Unfortunately they decided to absolutely destroy the freeposing round in the process.