Competitive bodybuilding has always been sort of a side note for T Nation. We’ve featured interviews with pros in the past, but only if they were willing to get into the nitty-gritty (no “So what’s your favorite color?” questions). We also had some contributors who were fans and wanted to talk to these guys. Not so much anymore.
It’s kinda interesting. Tim Patterson worked with a ton of these guys, like the Mentzer brothers and many others. But he wasn’t a “fan” of the stage stuff. He just wanted to learn what they know.
TC joked once that the smell of tanning oil gave him PTSD because early in his career he wrote about competitions for the magazines. He interviewed the pros too. But I don’t think he had their posters up on his garage-gym wall.
And I’ve been to a dozen Olympias and Arnolds, front row as press and even backstage, but I was never really a fan-fan. (I suppose I was more of a fan as a teenager, but even then I read mostly about Arnold, Zane, etc. – a generation or two before me). When I would attend the shows, I always looked for a different angle to cover. It was never about who won or whose left calf was superior.
I recall writing about the women’s bodybuilding Olympia and just saying: “Same dude as last year won.” Because who really cares? Well, not me at least.
In the past, perhaps when we were more gullible, we read the magazines to learn how the pros trained, to get their secret magical workouts. These were faked most of the time by the mags, but still.
There are millions of people who want to build muscle, but far fewer who care about the Biggest, Most Cut Person trophies. When strength and hypertrophy training started to get seriously studied, there was less reliance on “what the pros do” and more emphasis on what science has found and what respected coaches taught, Poliquin being one of the early examples. We didn’t have to go to Flex anymore to get workout ideas.
Something else I noticed at all the pro shows: There was definitely a group of fans who actually didn’t lift. They were either A) super fans of the sport, much like a football fan who doesn’t play or never played himself, or B) sexual fetishists. Mostly A, but the B folks were always around.
