Sport of Gods
Sport of Gods
Sport of Gods
Bodybuilding can be brutal, tough, painful but, all the while, exhilarating. Perhaps there is a divine hand in its action.
I can't decide if the gods hate bodybuilders personally, or if bodybuilders just throws the machinery of the world up against the light, that they may taunt us all the better. Because I know of no one who can describe their relationship with our sport in less than about half a page.
I like chocolate. I love my husband. I feel joy when we beat the Aussies. I feel sad when the IRS sends me letters inquiring thoughtfully about my financial affairs. But bodybuilding is a slippery eel. I like, love, loathe, fear and fight it every step of my life. It's like having a secret affair with Madonna, or possibly Boy George.
Fascinating, all-consuming, breathtakingly enriching and likely to make you swear regularly to 'never again'. The more I lift weights, the more I can. The less I train, the more I need to and the less I want to. Even at my fittest, the alarm clock makes me wish that I had followed the herd into golf or home-brewing.
Emotional
On the face of it we enjoy the simplest of sports, but the emotional and mental strength required to do it every day makes a net session with Brett Lee look tame. And when you finally do beat the couch potato voices in your head into submission, all that that means is that you are now fit enough to really hurt. And when it hurts, when we are strong enough to enter into the valley of the red mist, it's there that we find the pain that we love.
Bodybuilders are the Buddhists of the sporting universe. We beat no one but ourselves, for no reward but the lift itself. Try explaining that to a cricketer. You may be surprised to learn that your boss rides Harleys on the weekend, or enjoys a pick-up game of touch on a Thursday night. Those things don't define him through his day nearly as completely as bodybuilding does. Bodybuilders take the stairs, just to see how the Achilles is holding up. They park at the far end of parking lots, because nothing puts a 200m walk across flat tarmac into perspective like a morning spent in the gym lifting weights.
In a time of Vanity Fair-induced guilt, bodybuilders eat with joy and gusto and they see the world through sparkly eyes. Bodybuilders fill pre-dawn gyms with laughter and mark the ends of our training session with tears of relief.
Vanquished
I've never seen a bodybuilder give his opponent the send-off. Even the most social of hockey games has the victor and the vanquished as its central theme. In those private battles we inflict pain on each other that would be deemed vicious in any other code, and yet the handshake in the finishing tunnel speaks only of brotherhood and friendship and a moment shared.
Maybe the gods don't hate bodybuilders, perhaps they fear them. Bodybuilders step away from everything that is easy and safe and tame and they challenge the very fabric of what it is to be human. Is it any surprise that the Greeks, the first people to fully understand bodybuilding as a sport, also filled their folklore with tales of man in his interminable struggle against the divine?
Look into the eyes of the Mr and Ms Olympians the next time. You will realize that Shakespeare had it right, What a piece of work is a man... in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.
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