Increased interest in specialized muscle building arose at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, powerful muscles were considered not so much a means of survival or self-defense, but rather a return to the ancient Greek ideal – a harmoniously developed human body. The ancient tradition of weight lifting has evolved into the modern sport of weightlifting. As it developed, it acquired different directions.
In Europe, weightlifting has become one of the circus arts. Professional strongmen appeared – people who earned their living with various types of power rides. The beauty of the body did not matter to them, so they gravitated towards building healthy, massive bodies. In America, significant interest in the development of strength has emerged in connection with its effect on health. This was a time when Americans were beginning to move from farms and small towns to large cities. With the advent of the automobile, mobility increased, but the lifestyle became increasingly less mobile. In addition, the spread of new food processing technologies has led to the population consuming too many low-quality products. To this we must add living under constant stress. Against this background, supporters of physical culture and a healthy lifestyle appeared, who began the fight for general health and physical improvement.
They needed a role model, someone whose physique would embody the ideas they were trying to spread; someone embodying the image of an ancient Greek athlete, and not a regular at a Bavarian beer hall. They found such a person in the person of Eugene Sandow (In Russian sports literature, his name was Russified as Evgeny Sandow) – a superstar of physical culture at the turn of the century. Sandow became a professional strongman in Europe, where he successfully competed with other athletes, surpassing everyone in their own signature tricks. He came to America in the 1990s and received the support of Florenz Ziegfeld, who declared him “the strongest man in the world” and organized a tour for him. However, above all, Sandow stood out for the beauty and harmony of his physique. Sandow was, without a doubt, brilliant.
He loved to show off himself and loved it when people looked at his body and admired his strength tricks. He could stand naked, covered only with a fig leaf, behind the glass of a shop window and pose there in front of the public, with women sighing about the beauty and symmetry of his muscles. This celebration of the aesthetic qualities of the male body was something completely new. Sandow had amazing charm. Thanks to its popularity, the trade in dumbbells and weights has skyrocketed. Sandow earned thousands of dollars a week and created an entire industry around himself selling books and magazines. Competitions began to be held in which the physical characteristics of rivals were measured and compared, and Sandow presented his gold statuette to the winners as a reward. But in the end he suffered, overestimating his strength capabilities. They say that one day his car drove off the road and those around him persuaded Sandow to pull him out of the ditch with one hand.
This show of force ended with Sandow suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. Thus ended the life of a man to whom the English King George awarded the title of Professor of Physical Culture to His Royal Majesty. Georg Hackenschmidt was called the “Russian Lion” due to his outstanding achievements in weightlifting. He won the Russian weightlifting championship in 1898 and also won various world wrestling championships. He emigrated to Great Britain, where he made a fortune. He was a talented man, a skilled speaker and a prolific writer who created philosophical books such as, for example, “The Origin of Life.” He held discussions with intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein. There were others – Professor Attila, Arthur Saxon, Herman Homer, Oscar Hilgenfeldt, W. E. Pullum – a whole galaxy of famous strongmen, which was replenished by the names of Paul Anderson, Vasily Alekseev and other weightlifters of our days. One of those for whom exercise became a kind of religion was businessman-publisher Bernard McFadden, a man who could serve as an example of a “health fanatic.” To spread the idea that physical weakness was actually immoral, he founded the magazine Physical Culture. He later began publishing the New York Evening Graphic, which was aimed at an audience with the same level of education as himself. McFadden organized a series of competitions at Madison Square Garden for the title of “Men with the Most Perfect Physique in America.” The first such competition was held in 1903, and its winner, along with the title, received a prize – one thousand dollars (at that time this was already a fortune). Both the competitions and the magazine have been successful for decades. McFadden not only preached and exhorted, but also put his ideas into practice. Every morning, he walked barefoot from his home on Riverside Drive in New York to his office in the center of the city, and appeared at the editorial office of his magazine, bare-chested, a picture of health and excellent physical shape, although he was over seventy years old. McFadden would probably disapprove of modern bodybuilding, with its emphasis on showmanship rather than athletic prowess. However, he and other athletes played a large role in the evolution of bodybuilding. His pageants fostered a growing interest in body image rather than just muscle strength, and the pageants produced a superstar who was destined to become one of the most famous people in America for decades to come.
The winner of the McFadden Competition in 1921 was a young man named Angelo Siciliano. To capitalize on his growing fame, this magnificently built man changed his name to Charles Atlas and acquired the rights to sell a mail-order physical training course called Dynamic Tension. For more than fifty years, growing up boys have seen advertisements for this course in magazines and comic books: the frail boy gets sand kicked in his face, the boy applies for a muscle development course, and then returns to beat up the bully and take back his lost girlfriend.
“Hey, weakling, your ribs are sticking out!” it became the most memorable slogan of one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.
