sarcasm lost on you bug?
as usual with joe weider it comes down to dollars and cents.
he knew oliva was the best in the world. hell, everyone knew, but sergio was a black man living in a country where money and power was white.
sergio wasn't appreciated as a great bber or even a man. he was viewed in awe as a spectacle, 'the 4 legged man'. kind of how you might look at a massive silver back gorrilla at the zoo.
if you were a black athlete beating white athletes in america at that time and you wanted to get paid, you had better be a LOT MORE charismatic than every other guy (eg. cassius clay aka muhammad ali) or you went on the scrap heap like every other great black athlete that was naive enough to think that they were actually 'equal' or remotely close.
didn't matter that oliva and nubret weren't even from america, weider knew why they didn't sell and he wasn't about to waste his time and money trying to figure out how to whiten them up and he sure as hell wasn't going to turn oliva and nubret, who could barely speak english and were introverted like most bbers, into an ali. apart from anything else, bbing didn't have anything close to the paying fan base of boxing and never would have.
did weider feel a sense of compassion or concience? afterall, didn't anti-semitic prejudices cause it's fair share of persecution of the jews? have people of jewish origin ever given 2 shits about persecution of anyone but jews? ...and since when did persecution or racism get in the way of making a dollar for a jewish man?
hell no, if joe couldn't find a white man in america that he could make mr olympia with any credibility, he was going to import one from...austria...the son of a nazi...oh, the irony.
enter arnold. while the myth was working 2 jobs to make ends meet while maintaining his status as the best physique on the planet (by far), arnold was flown from austria, cabbed from the air port to a hotel room, fed, clothed, an apartment provided, immediately put on a wage and introduced to white power and money, the movers and shakers baby, the real deal minus the white hoods. during the day, when arnold wasn't in the gym which he had mostly to himself at 10:00am (apart from adoring training partners to boost his ego, change his weights and sit on his back for sets of donkey raises), he could be found sunning himself, smoking pot and cruising free sex on the balmy beaches of california. ahhhhh...
meanwhile, in a butcher shop somewhere in chicago, sergio
slaved away 12 hour days + 3 hours in a gym, sleep a few hours and do it again.
so, sergio not being a stupid man and with all his senses intact, starts to compare his lot with arnold's lot. afterall
he was king of the hill, not arnold.
well, not one to get too caught up in negativity, he figured, "oh, what the hell, i'll just beat him at the upcoming mr o and i'll get mine."
so he did and....
nothing..."hmmm, ok then, if old schmoe not goin to pay me, i'm going to get mine somewhere else."
boom, just the reason joe needed to remove his rising star's biggest threat (irony...wasn't arnold supposed to be the threat?). sergio was gone and he wasn't going to get back in. joe wasn't going to risk his prize investment ever again and when another black bber, nubret, came knocking at the door of arnold's supremacy, joe did exactly the same again. luckily, nubret stayed in his native land and was honoured there. unfortunately, returning to cuba was not an option for sergio as he had defected from that country and the penalty for defecting to castro's sworn enemy, america, would have probably meant sergio oliva would have never been seen or heard of again.
