Joe Roark: Excellent Book About A Tragic Period In Bodybuilding

I have finished reading Randy’s latest book, and will say that he has a wonderful way of organizing various inputs to produce an output of a well-ordered, sensible story line, and that his analysis of 1980 Mr. Olympia, and of the 1981 Mr. Olympia, convinced me that those two events were not only won by the wrong men (Schwarzenegger and Columbu) but that other placings also were thereby skewed. I had known before that neither man deserved the win but Randy’s presentation is the best I have seen all these later years now that the posing oil has dried.

[Indeed, after Arnold won in 1980, I showed a back shot of three men to my wife, who knows as much as bodybuilding as I do planning a moon landing, asking her, ‘which of these three men has the least developed back muscles?’. She looked at the photo and pointing said, ‘that guy’. She was pointing to Arnold. But somehow, veteran judges could not see what my wife discerned in mere seconds?]

Also thoroughly disheartening were the attitudes that Arnold and Franco seemed to have that the IFBB contest world was their plaything and they had the ability, by their very participation, to win well past their primes and monkey wrench the temporary future after doing so.

It is an excellent book about a very sad, tragic, period in bodybuilding history.”

Joe Roark,
Veteran Historian