The Road to a Rebuilt Reputation

Does Bodybuilding need to take a long hard look at itself?

by Simon Sparrowhawk

The use of performance enhancing drugs has harmed the reputation of a number of sports throughout history and it has gone rather unnoticed that bodybuilding has suffered the same fate quite dramatically.
To enjoy or understand it you need to suppose, first that the male body is a potentially beautiful thing, capable of being worked and perfected like a piece of sculpture.

Those are the words of respected academics Gaines and Butler who studied bodybuilding very closely in the 1970s. The idea that bodybuilders set out with the intention of being statuesque, while achieving perfect muscle definition was very common 30 years ago, however, as the decades have passed the priorities have changed.

Aspiring bodybuilder Adam Sinicki, 20, has been training since 1996 and after years of hard work and dedication he is saddened that general public consensus seems to be that all bodybuilders are pumped full of steroids.

I think that a lot of people connect bodybuilding with drugs. Drug use goes on in every sport but Bodybuilders seem to get a particularly hard time about it, said Sinicki.

In bodybuilding people assume that all of the competitors are using them - whether rightly or wrongly - and this obviously gives it a bad name.

This is a concern for the future of the sport because with the majority believing drugs are heavily involved it's difficult to see parents being happy to see their child taking part for example.

A quick glance at Flex or Muscle & Fitness will show you the image of the modern bodybuilder, complete with oversized bulging muscles. Size that many feel is unatainable without some help from steroids or synthetic hormones.

However, not every competition is like this. There are All Natural competitions on the bodybuilding circuit that are rarely covered by high-profile media outlets.

Although, the very fact that these competitions exist is surely of major concern to bodybuilding enthusiasts as it appears to confirm the wide-ranging fears that a large percentage of leading athletes use performance enhancing drugs.

The all natural competitions don't get the same kind of attention as the Mr Olympias - but then obviously that's what people want to see,' added Sinicki.

'I admire what the likes of Jay Cutler have done but I won't be doing it myself and perhaps bodybuilding would be better if someone a bit smaller, but with greater detail, won for a change.

'But that'll probably only happen when and if drugs are completely banned from the sport.'

Sinicki later suggested that although the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) subscribes to all the anti-doping codes and regulations their testing system has an obvious and major flaw.

They give prior warning to the athlete that they will be coming to test them in the near future, thereby giving them the opportunity flush the drugs out of their system - and muscle gained from steroids can be maintained for several months.

Surely this is a worrying sign for the authorities as the reason for testing athletes without giving notification is that it prevents the use of banned substances while training, before removing them in time for competition. Therefore, the IFBB are inadvertently enabling athletes to beat the regulations and this is something Sinicki believes is down to the consumer nature of the sport.

'The problem is that audiences/judges no longer place as much emphasis on detail and symmetry as they did a number of years ago, instead they want to be amazed by the size of the athlete.'

'Subsequently they almost allow the use of drugs to go unchecked as this makes for the most dramatic television.'

In the pre-televised sport era this was not a problem because judges looked for sculpted perfection with athletes aiming to, as Thirer and Greer once said, '[develop muscles] to a high degree of hypertrophy and symmetry?with the object of perfect visual harmony'.

Bodybuilding has deep-roots within the world of theatre, historically at least, because of its use of choreography to display the muscular definition and although the highly competitive element has altered this slightly, it continues to be similar to what former Mr. Olympia Frank Zane described as 'a ballet'.