Who cares?
All fixed anyway.
This is my point precisely. There is so much controversy on this board about the placings and yet nobody seems to know who the judges were, where they sat, etc. And these are the people that are making all these final decisions.
I don't look at any other bodybuilding boards except one newer, smaller one. Have there been any interviews with the judges? Questioning them on what they saw wrong with this competitor or that competitor, or that so and so needed a better back or so and so needed better conditioning, etc.
The way this is all done it looks very shady. It's like the old backroom politics; somebody sits in an office and decides a week in advance who is going to be Mr. O, these are going to be the rankings, doesn't matter how they look, etc. What could really help bodybuilding (and certainly the competitors I would think) is transparency. Make it a real sport, with open judging like figure skating or gymnastics or diving.
And again I go back to the comment I heard from Shawn Ray: if you have the same judges year after year you get the same placings year after year.
The way it is now I know if I were competing at the O level, I sure as fuck would want to find out in advance who those judges are, and I would pay each one of them a friendly courtesy visit. And if they wanted me to peel, I probably would.
