Treasures from the Archive: Ms Olympia Memories: Part I The Magazine Years

Can’t say I remember too clearly what it was like having to follow the Ms Olympia a month (or two) after it had actually happened through the pages of Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Ironman and so on, but whenever I come across an image of Cory Everson with a big medal around her neck, flanked by one or both of the Weiders and/or one or both of the women who made up the top three that year, her arms held aloft, it invariably seems familiar, and takes me back to those early magazine years.

Then, as far as my teenage female muscle obsessive self was concerned anyway, the result was a given. The Ms Olympia was not so much a contest as the annual coronation of the most physically perfect woman in the world. And clearly that was Cory.

In those days you were never exactly starved of images of her to drool over (especially in Weider publications), but for me it was the pics of Cory on stage that were always the most drool-worthy, so the Olympia editions were prized possessions. The tan, the oil, the striations, the muscles, and, I particularly remember, the bikini bottoms so tight that I was forced to spend hours, possibly days, of my life just looking (slightly puzzled at that tender age) at whatever was making that shape between her legs!

But, of course, there were other women, and in those very early days Anja Langer was, I reckoned, probably the second most physically perfect woman in the world… The judges didn’t see it my way (not for the last time) in 1987 (left, below) when she finished 4th, but in 1988 (right) Anja was runner-up to (of course!) Cory Everson.

These days, I’m convinced that the reason I’ve found myself reacting so positively to the Physique division (much more positively than I’d expected to when it was first announced) is largely because the aesthetic is so reminiscent of Anja’s and the other female bodybuilders’ at the time I first discovered my love of female muscle. Over 25 years later, it seems I’m still programmed to respond to this “classical” aesthetic.

And staying in those early years (but not in the sense that it was an image I saw in a magazine), a screencap of Gladys Portugues during her routine at the 1986 Ms Olympia. It was intended for posting earlier in the year when FMS explored The Agony & the Ecstasy experienced by female bodybuilders when prepping and competing.

Now I’ve seen women (and men) looking this deliriously happy before, but they tended to be in sweaty clubs set up in old railway arches in the late 1990s and all of them had ingested a substance whose effects gave it its name. I doubt Gladys had had any of that, nor that she looked so ecstatic because Jean-Claude had promised to buy her a dog. This is what pure, unadulterated, Olympian female muscle ecstasy looks like!

We return to my formative female muscle lovin’ years with three of the most “exotic” (to a teenage boy in a London suburb anyway!) and, therefore, most exciting women I had the pleasure of seeing inside the covers of the magazines containing Olympia reports. Future Ms Olympia Juliette Bergmann (above left) seemed, I recall, almost impossibly beautiful, and was probably responsible for my eagerness to visit Holland – much more so than the more conventional attractions for a young man. Marie-Laure Mahabir (above right) seemed to be from a different planet altogether.

The months when pictures from the Olympia appeared in the magazines tended to be the only ones featuring European-based FBBs like Marie-Laure, and I guess because I had seen so few images of them it made them all the more exciting – they were more memorable because they were so rare. Their placing at the show was utterly irrelevant to me, though perhaps it did cross my mind how such a magnificently sensual creature like Claudia Profanter could possibly finish 14th (as she did in ’91).

But while it may have been an advantage to be European to get Swell’s attention (or maybe that should be to bring Swell to attention), it was by no means necessary. As my teenage years drew to a close, Denise Rutkowski‘s feline power and unforgettable gold bikini proved an irresistible combination. And, for the first time in my life, I was, actually, trying to resist the lure of female muscle in order to appear all normal and stuff as I left school and moved away to university.

[Incidentally, if you are the sort who likes to know how the FBBs of your youth are looking now I am honour-bound to warn you that YOU SHOULD NOT TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT DENISE RUTKOWSKI LOOKS LIKE NOW. I had the misfortune to see, and it is haunting me. Really. Trust me. DON’T.]

And though I regularly fell off the wagon, discovering the likes of Denise, Yolanda Hughes and Natalia Murnikoviene (above, left and right respectively) when I did, I think of that first effort at repressing my desire to view images of female bodybuilders as the end of “The Magazine Years”. By the time I re-embraced my sthenolagnia in the late ’90s, I didn’t need to rely on the mainstream muscle magazines for my fix – there was Women’s Physique World and, a bit later, Muscle Elegance. It’s rather ironic (and quite fitting) then that I couldn’t actually find a magazine scan of Yolanda at the Olympia from a muscle magazine, and instead had to use a WPW pic.

Oh, look! It’s Cory winning again…

And I leave you for today with Denise Rutkowski as I would like to remember her, performing her (I think it’s fair to say) LEGENDARY routine from 1993. She finished second, and by all accounts that I know of, should have won.

On this evidence, it’s easy to see why people would have thought so.

(If you’ve already got the box of tissues in in preparation for the excitement of this Friday’s 2014 meat-fest, now might be a good time to crack them open…)

Enjoy!

More Ms O memories coming soon…

The Way Legs Were

With the notable exception of the (then and now) freaky pair of legs that belonged to a certain Bev Francis, back in my formative years as a female muscle head, the only legs around were rarely as muscular as the majority of women who compete in the physique division today. However, it is, as Einstein once said, all relative, and at the time, the women I saw in the muscle magazines I obsessively bought were more than big enough to get my teenage eyes popping out of my head (among other things).

So today, courtesy as ever of the heroes who scan and upload images from those 1980s mainstream muscle magazines, a trip down memory lane, a bit of nostalgia for all those furtive purchases we made in newsagent’s all over the world and the women that made those purchases so urgent. Today, we remember the way legs were.

Rachel McLish

I don’t remember this image particularly, but it serves to indicate how little muscle (by today’s standards, and even, in some ways, by early 80s standards) it took for a woman to be ‘muscular’ back then. I arrived at the female muscle party just a little late for Rachel McLish in her competitive pomp, but it seems to me she actually got bigger after she stopped competing.

Carla Dunlap and Clare Furr

Brian Eno named-chacked Carla in a recent interview, provoking some bizarrely hysterical reactions from the female muscle brethren (more about that on FMS in the future). He says, I remember in the early 1980s when female bodybuilders first started appearing and there was one I really liked, Carla Dunlap. She was Ms Olympia or something like that. She was this amazing black woman, absolutely musclebound, beautiful. ‘Absolutely musclebound’, he says, and that’s exactly what Carla would have seemed to be at that time, not just to Eno but to me too. To her right, Clare Furr’s (slightly later) thighs seem positively other-worldly compared to Carla’s. ‘Absolutely musclebound’ back in the early to mid-80s could become ‘hardly musclebound’ almost overnight.

Tonya Knight and Mary Roberts

As I recall, images of women training like this one of Tonya squatting were far more numerous in the magazines of the 1980s, and only if you were lucky would there be the kind of ‘glamour shot’ the we can see Mary Roberts in here on the right. It sometimes came (again, this is as I recall, so don’t take this as gospel) at the beginning or end of a training photoset, I guess as a way of showing how the hard work pays off. I found, in general, that these shots were much more attention-grabbing, presumably because they were more unusual.

Marjo Selin

And gradually, legs got bigger. Compare the next few groups of images. I really can’t say if they are at all chronological (this post is simply not that well-researched!), let’s call it ‘legological’ or perhaps ‘podological’ (!). I just wanted to illustrate the point somehow. By the time you get to Jackie Paisley, who is (and I do know this) very much late 80s and into the early 90s, legs have, well, you can see for yourself, changed.

Lisa Lorio, Janet Tech and Juliette Bergmann in her early days.

Sue Gafner and Dorothy Herndon

Marie Mahabir, Rene Casella and Jackie Paisley

Sandy Riddell and Anja Langer

Two of my favourite pairs of legs of the period (among many). I was especially taken with Anja’s calves. Even today, as I look at the way they bulge outwards so that you can see them even when looking at her leg front on, they are magnificent, so at the time they would have been quite literally breathtaking.

Cory Everson

This image, for me, evokes a lot about that time in my female muscle life, not least the way the women in the magazines used to always seem to be glistening. The style of photography of the time, no doubt, nothing more, but I came to think of that sheen as the glow of health and vitality that only female bodybuilders possess. Impossible to post anything about the 80s without her, Cory is the epitome of female muscle in that decade, her legs as much as any part of her wondrous physique. Funny now to think that once upon a time I couldn’t imagine Cory and her contemporaries getting any bigger or better.

Enjoy!

Abs Week: Abs of Yesteryear

or THE ABS THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH ABS

Anja Langer

My first Abs Queen. Soon after I first got turned-on to female muscle, I saw an issue of Muscle & Fitness in my local newsagent with Anja on the cover in contest shape in a black bikini (very similar to the image on the right if that is not the image itself). I couldn’t have stopped myself buying it even if I’d wanted to. And of course the reason I bought it was so that I could masturbate while looking at her, but while I did plenty of that, I also remember spending a lot of time just looking at her, following the contours of her muscles with my eyes and thinking how perfect her body was. And thinking the most perfect part of her body was her stomach (I doubt I even knew they were called abs then).

Tonya Knight

I’m pretty sure that the reason for my reaction to Anja’s, Tonya’s, and countless other female bodybuilders’ abs in those first few years was that I had never seen anything like them before, and they were so different from the norm. This must have been the reason for the intensity of my physical response to them. Sure, I’d seen athletes, but they weren’t wearing bikinis and deliberately flexing. This was a completely new concept to me, and these were a completely new kind of woman.

Sharon Bruneau

A female muscle Etna, Sharon smoulders in the kind of abs-revealing swimsuit that seems to have gone right out of vogue. And I think that is a crying shame, because once upon a time, there was a teenage female muscle fan who used to jump for joy when he found one of his pin-ups in a magazine who was wearing one.

Sandy Riddell and Valerie Scott model two more examples.

Whether these swimsuits revealed as much of the pec area as they did the abs (like Sharon’s above) or revealed just about everything else (like Valerie’s) didn’t (and still doesn’t) matter to me. There just needs to be a space where the abs go. For what it’s worth, I reckon the abs-revealing swimsuit (there is probably a proper name but I don’t care what it is) died because there are simply not enough women in the world who look good in them to make it economically viable. Or something.

Juliette Bergmann and Marjo Selin

MAJOR teenage crushes. While my classmates pasted the lead singer of The Bangles (whatever her name was) to the inside of their locker doors, and I pretended to like her too, of course, back at home I was drooling over the likes of Juliette and Marjo. Not only did they have the sexy sexy abs (as well as other muscles) that I desired, they were just so EXOTIC. I still find the young Juliette’s unique beauty absolutely mouth-watering, and as for Marjo, I didn’t even know how to pronounce her name (Mar-Joe? Mar-Yo?) and it doesn’t get any more exotic than that.

Alphie Newman

To a boy from the suburbs of London, Alphie seemed to be the epitome of the all-American girl. An all-American girl with a six-pack and muscles everywhere else too. And what’s more she was more or less the same age as me, leading to all sorts of fantasies. Unfortunately, in the suburbs of London in the late 1980s, girls like Alphie were in short supply. My imagination, though, was limitless.

Tara Dodane and Marie Mahabir

Issues of muscle magazines with contest reports of female bodybuilding shows were always must-buys. These days female bodybuilding is a footnote in the general muscle media, but once upon a time there were full page pictures of all the top placing contestants and their big hair and ripped abs.

WPW Covers

Whether there were abs on the cover or not, WPW was always a must-buy, but here’s two examples of covers that would have got me even hotter under the collar than usual, from issues that were over ten years apart. On the left, female muscle pioneer Kay Baxter, and on the right an image of Karen Netterstrom that I reckon has become one of the iconic shots of female muscle fandom.

Christa Bauch and Charla Sedacca

And inside the covers of those WPW magazines, physiques the likes of which I had never imagined. They were so different from mainstream portrayals of ideal beauty, they were so lean, their muscles so defined, and for me they were so exciting to behold. In those days, you thought you might be the only one who found these women beautiful and sexy, leading to all kinds of confusion. It’s a better world for female muscle fans now that I can share my love of images like the ones of Christa and Charla with you.

Laura Creavalle and Negrita Jayde: Unforgettable

And to finish, back to the mainstream muscle media. Two images that I would have first come across in the mainstream muscle mags as a teenage boy and then rediscovered through the internet many many years later thanks to the efforts of the lovely people who scan. These images of Laura and Negrita were so familiar after so many years that I could almost smell the magazine when I saw them again. The kind of images from my youth that made me the female muscle fan I remain to this day.

Enjoy!

And don’t forget to vote for your favourite abs!

Saint Valentina: I Heart Muscle

Readers from the UK may remember the TV series Louis Theroux’ Weird Weekends, indeed female muscle lovers all over the world may be aware of one particular episode involving female bodybuilding (there’s a clip from that show of him meeting fans at the Jan Tana that has been posted up on forum boards and blogs – you can see the whole episode here).

Less well-known to female muscle heads, however, is an episode from the same series, in which Louis meets hypnotists, including a pick-up artist who tries to teach him how to be successful with women. In a scene in a gym, there is, very briefly, an appearance by a woman who reminds me of Kelly Felske. It’s over in a flash, and I can remember sitting there watching it when it was first broadcast and wondering if I had just imagined it. I probably did imagine it, on seeing a repeat, she doesn’t look a lot like Kelly Felske (and if it is her, she’s past her peak).

Even though I’m pretty sure now that it wasn’t actually Kelly in the clip, the fact that I imagined she was in the documentary says something about my mental state. I probably shouldn’t think too much more about that, but it’s not going to stop me posting a couple of pics of this gorgeous old school goddess at her peak.

Anyway, the pick-up artist basically takes Louis to places where he regularly picks up women, and the gym is one of those. While he’s talking Louis through how he does it (they are kind of working out at the same time) the artist spies ‘Kelly’, and we get a brief shot of her loading a plate onto a barbell.

The artist stops talking for a moment as he gazes at ‘Kelly’. Then he turns back to Louis and says: Now that’s what I love on a woman… Muscle.

And then the episode just carries on as before. There is, unfortunately maybe, no scene where the guy actually picks up a muscle woman – as I remember he doesn’t pick up a woman in the gym at all.

So why am I telling you all about this? Well, there is a point, and it is this. Lovers of female muscle (myself included) seem to spend a lot of time justifying what it is we love about it to ourselves, to each other, maybe even to those who deride our preference. And when we do, we don’t usually put it as succinctly as the pick up artist, but basically, that is what it is all about – the muscles. Maybe we don’t say it because it’s just so obvious. But nevertheless, it needs to be said, so here I go…

In the same way that many guys can’t understand what we find arousing about female bodybuilders, I can’t conceive what it is like to not be aroused by muscles on a woman. When others say female bodybuilders lack the curves of a conventionally sexy woman, I am genuinely confused. I too love curves on a woman, and muscle women have curves everywhere because they are covered in muscles. They have curves in places that most women don’t have places. To me, they are the most curvaceous, and therefore, the sexiest, women of all.

Hot stuff: from Zuzana to Gillian and all points inbetween, for me, it’s always been about those sexy muscular curves.

I love the way muscles look whether relaxed or flexed, in motion or frozen in a photographic image. If sthenolagnia is ‘arousal by the display of strength or muscles’, then the keywords for me are ‘display’ and ‘muscles’.

Back in the days of the trip to the newsagent’s to get my female muscle fixes, I would buy the magazines so that I could masturbate while looking at the pictures of the likes of Cory, Anja etc. And I did plenty of that. But I also remember that I would spend a lot of time just following the contours of their bodies with my eyes, thinking about how perfect their bodies were.

First loves: Cory and Anja provided early examples of physical perfection to my teenage female muscle lovin’ mind.

And I dreamed that one day I would get to touch those muscles, to follow the contours of those magnificent bodies with not just my eyes, but with my hands. To feel the hard muscle beneath the skin, well, I couldn’t imagine anything better.

Looks good, feels good, tastes good.

Unfortunately, I never got to touch Cory or Anja! But I have felt the muscles of dancers, gymnasts and martial artists with my own hands (hands that were shaking with the excitement of the moment) and even despite my idealised expectations, I was not disappointed. It was heaven!

I’ve lived long enough to know that it’s muscle that turns me on more than anything. I love it. Any amount of it will do, but the more muscle there is, the more defined and proportional it is, the more turned on I will be. I simply find muscular female physiques to be more beautiful and more sensual than any other body type.

‘Any amount of muscle will do’, but we all have our favourite bodies and our favourite bodyparts. Two of my favourite muscle women and two of my favourite bodyparts. Cathy Le Francois’ striated glutes and the incredible ripped eight-pack of Oana Hreapca are among many of mine.

Hi, my name’s David, and I’m a female muscle lover.

Happy Saint Valentina’s Day!

Meine Top 5 Deutsch Muskel Mädchen: Winner

My all time favourite German Muscle Maiden (für die Erinnerungen)

She was on the cover of the first bodybuilding magazine I ever bought. This particular (UK) issue of Muscle and Fitness was possibly the first one I’d seen that had only a woman on the cover. And what a woman! I’d flicked through magazines in shops before, furtively ogling the female bodybuilders as the adrenalin rush that I have become so familiar with coursed through my body (and pretending to look at the training articles when someone came near enough to see what I was reading!), but I’d never gone through with actually purchasing one.

The sight of Anja’s incredible body, ripped and oiled in a black bikini was just too much. ‘The Madness’ overtook me. I couldn’t leave the shop without the magazine, or more accurately, without the woman on the cover.

Dry-mouthed and paranoid that someone I knew would walk in and see what I was doing, but compelled nonetheless, I whipped the magazine off the shelf and went up to the counter and paid. For some reason, the shopkeeper put it in a brown paper bag, usually used to hide porn! Were my intentions that obvious? I quickly popped it into my bag and left the shop in a hurry.

I bounced along the road, ecstatic. I was taking a female bodybuilder home!

That was the first, but certainly not the last time I walked home from that shop with a brown paper bag that contained a magazine with a pictoral of Anja Langer.

In the days before millions of images of female muscle were just clicks away, each picture of these amazing, completely unconventional-looking women was an event in itself for me. The fact that, compared with today, so many fewer images were available gave each one a higher value. I remember I could look at one picture for so long, committing every inch of it to memory, that even today, many years later, I can recall Anja’s photos from that first magazine I bought.

The way her shoulders curved up and out, the way her abdominals seem to be pulling her tiny waist in, her hard muscular chest, the way her thigh and calf muscles flared out – all these details and more became locked away in my brain. When I got online and found pictures of Anja my reaction was that she was exactly how I remembered her – beautiful, gracefully feline, and covered in sexy solid muscles.

For my top German muscle maiden, I really couldn’t choose anyone else.
Anja, Danke für die Erinnerungen!

And to my deutsche Leser, Danke fürs Lesen! And please get in touch at 6ft1swell@gmail.com or by commenting below, even if you only want to correct my google-translator German. But I’d be especially pleased to hear who your favourite German muscle babes are. Who do you think have I overlooked?
I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

For the last time, Viel Spaß!