In an effort to find yet another way to fill seats to watch female bodybuilding, fitness, and figure, events that have proven time and again that they cannot sustain themselves at the professional level, AMI and the IFBB have elected to degrade the Mr. Olympia contest in an effort to sell more tickets for Friday night. Instead of premier event standing on its own, Mr. Olympia now again has to share the stage with various aspects of the women's contests. The Olympia judging has been moved to Friday night and must now share the time with the Ms. Olympia and Fitness finals. If you thought the Mr. Olympia judging last year was abbreviated, with the judges opting for an early lunch over ensuring they got the placings right and providing a good show for the paying customers, can you imagine how little time will be given to it after being mixed in with two to three hours of female competition? Or, perhaps they are really planning on a four or five hour show on Friday night. If so, bring your No-Doz so you can stay awake to see what you really came to see. And, if the posing round is not judged, it should be interesting to see how the guys look on Saturday after gorging on pizza and all of the other foods they could not eat while dieting for the show.
In addition, the Fitness finals have been added to the Mr. Olympia finals instead of expanding Mr. Olympia night show to really showcase all of the physiques, especially the top guys. We are likely to see the same abbreviated posing routines as last year, even for the top fifteen. T and A has replaced the Challenge Round. With all of the glitches of the Challenge Round last year, unlike the judging, we at least got to see the top five compared against each other for an extended period, whether you liked the end results or not. One guarantee for this year is likely to be that if Ronnie wins again, his acceptance speech will be longer than they give him on stage for his posing routine.
All told, it could turn out to be worse than last year, since if you look at the contest schedule leading up to the Olympia, there could be over thirty guys on the stage at the end of September. This is too many, but no matter how many there are, they all deserve to get a chance to be fairly compared all the way down the line up, and to show their stuff on the Olympia stage. What do you want to bet that they are not going to get it?
I find it mind boggling, that after the complaints from last year over these same issues, AMI/IFBB would repeat their mistakes all over again, albeit in a somewhat different form. It seems to me that they have a very different agenda than providing the best possible show for the vast majority of fans whose primary interest is in seeing the Mr. Olympia contest. The logical thing would be to put all the women's contest on Friday, but then of course, the theater would be largely empty except for those VIP ticket holders that had nothing better to do in Las Vegas on a Friday night. I have nothing but admiration for the hard work and dedication of the female athletes, as I am sure that most of the fans do, but that should not mean that we should have to accept a less than it could be Mr. Olympia because the women cannot not sell enough tickets on their own to support their sports.
I will be sitting in a VIP seat again this year; however, I am afraid I will leave the contest wondering why I went to the expense of attending only to be disappointed again.
