Pavol Jablonický

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome the legend. Divine, perfect, seven-time champion Mr. Olympia, the greatest action hero and governor of the state of California."

The speaker introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger and the crowd went crazy. Just the way he entered the podium was rousing. It took a few minutes. He put on a bright smile, waved to the audience, pointed a finger at someone here and there, and hugged the moderator, even though he didn't know him. He picked up the microphone, walked to the edge of the stage, and was silent for several long seconds before asking: "How are you?" 

It didn't matter what he said. People were going crazy.

Mr. Olympia 2004. I was standing on the same stage with a man who made bodybuilding a global show. He had come to announce the winner of our competition. That night, at the most prestigious event where only the biggest personalities of our sport received an invitation, I achieved the best result of my career. I was 41 years old and I had 15 years of professional experience. My form was enough for 11th place. Twenty people with a carved figure stood side by side in the final, where American Ronnie Coleman had just made history with his seventh title.

But Arnold stole most of the energy, even though he had been in retirement for a quarter of a century. No one could match him. Schwarzenegger was a symbol of something bigger: the embodiment of dreams. In the 1970s, he started the golden age of bodybuilding. I admired him when I started going to competitions. As soon as I could go overseas after the Velvet Revolution, my first trip in 1990 led to California’s Venice Beach near Los Angeles, where Gold’s Gym stands. It was there that Arnold worked out and transformed it into a mecca of muscle men.

Unfortunately, the last time I was there, the beautiful beach had become a place for the homeless. It had lost its luster, which is the same thing that happened to my sport, in which I won two amateur world championships, a Grand Prix and received six invitations to Mr. Olympia.

I started at a time when aesthetics dominated bodybuilding. The champions looked like racehorses, but over time the desire shifted towards as much mass as possible. If you had a circumference of fifty centimeters across the biceps or calf, you were just a beginner. In my eyes, it changed for the worse, transforming to absolute unnaturalness. You see the stars on the covers of magazines now and you don't think it looks good. You can't admire it and there’s no way you would want to look like that.

I say this as a person who loves the sport and was at the top in the early 1990s. I tried to represent bodybuilding as a culture. There was no one better in Europe than me. My posters were on the walls in almost every gym, not only in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. People recognized me in the Bahamas on the beach, in Mexico at the pyramids, in the Louvre in France. I enjoyed it.

Bodybuilding was my lifestyle and it still is to this day. I'm 58 and I still work out twice a day in my gym in Olomouc. Wherever I go, you can see at a glance what sport has touched my life. I enter the Hungarian spa in my swimsuit and everyone notices. I know it, and I know exactly who's looking at me. Mostly, it's my peers who look like seals. They wonder how I did it.