In January 1977, when I was a little boy sitting at a restaurant table in Manhattan, a reporter for the New York Times asked me if I wanted to be a weightlifter.
It would have been an odd icebreaker for an interview with a 4 year old, except I was at a party for the New York premiere of Pumping Iron. It was a film by my father, George Butler, about the weird and amazing and wonderful subculture of American bodybuilding. By this point I was pretty used to muscular men, but the reporter was intrigued by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was there too. She quipped in her story that “the 57-inch Mr. Universe chest temporarily blocked passage to the buffet table for a famous guest, Andy Warhol.”
Schwarzenegger himself wasn’t a big name. He hadn’t been Conan, or the Terminator, or a kindergarten cop – or the governor of California. But as the reporter noted, he was a three-time Mr. Universe, the best bodybuilder in the world. And “Pumping Iron,” an unconventional hit, would launch his Hollywood career.
Bodybuilder Franco Columbu, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger, holds up young writer Desmond Butler. (George Butler/contact press photos)
Schwarzenegger was fascinating on the big screen – his physique, charisma and humor made him a natural star. And in the film he explained how he got there. He saw himself as an artist:
“You look in the mirror and see that you need a little more deltoids to create symmetry. So you train and tighten more deltoids. A sculptor slaps things on it,” he says to the camera.
BUILT&BROKEN
A Washington Post investigation into a tip about the exploitation of women in bodybuilding led to the family that has dominated the sport for decades. This multi-part series explores family responsibilities in sport and the impact it has on the thousands of athletes who participate.
Do you have a tip about the bodybuilding world? Email reporters at [email protected]
The bodybuilder’s chisels are barbells, dumbbells and 45-pound plates that clatter in sweaty gyms. Being a top bodybuilder takes countless hours of exertion in the weight room and consuming absurd amounts of food. It takes extreme discipline and determination to admire qualities I was taught as a boy.
My father was a photographer before he became a filmmaker, and Pumping Iron, the book, predated film. Through its photos and writing with Charles Gaines, the book makes it clear that bodybuilding is based on a nostalgia for the classic ideal. It suggests that the top bodybuilders of the 1970s were modeled after Michelangelo’s “David.” “Pumping Iron” proved convincingly that bodybuilding is not a freak show, but a serious sport.
Desmond Butler at the family farm in Holderness, NH (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
The film not only fueled Schwarzenegger’s fame, but also the fitness craze of the 1980s. At my father’s house, sport was with us long after film left theaters. His black and white photographs have hung on the walls of our family home for as long as I can remember.
When he was shooting “Pumping Iron II” about female bodybuilders, he sometimes took me with him on his shoots. At the age of 10 I went to Australia with him to film one of the stars of the documentary, Bev Francis, who was one of the best powerlifters in the world. It was the kind of adventure my father loved and had taught me to love. He later directed films on subjects as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt’s African safari, Antarctic exploration and the fate of the ivory woodpecker.
I never became a bodybuilder. I’ve never been drawn to film or photography. But I became a storyteller – a reporter – and it wasn’t long after I started my career abroad that I was drawn to the investigative side of journalism. I like the hunt for evidence, the challenge of solving mysteries and the focus on injustice.
I’ve worked in London, Berlin, Istanbul, New York and DC dealing with terrorism, war, lobbying and bad government. I’ve covered the war in Syria and the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and I once spent a year investigating a crazy plan by the US government to set up a Twitter-like social network in Cuba. But until recently, getting into bodybuilding had never crossed my mind, despite hearing sometimes shocking and unreported stories. Now, at the age of 50 and a year after my father passed away, I am researching the sport that made it famous.
George Butler photographs Arnold Schwarzenegger in the early 1970s. (George Butler/contact press photos)
Where my father once trained his cameras on the great personalities of athletes, our coverage focuses on the sport’s stewards and where they have taken him since 1977.
He died last fall after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Despite his illness, he worked until almost the end. In 2013, he traveled deep into the ravages of the disease to a remote part of Bangladesh called the Sundarbans to film footage of swamp-dwelling tigers for an upcoming Imax film. It was the kind of determination he illuminated in Pumping Iron.
A memorial service in December was attended by many old friends at a church near his former Manhattan home and office. Some of them were people I knew from my childhood window into the bodybuilding world. Bill Grant, a top Muscle Beach-era competitor captured in “Pumping Iron,” was there. Such was Carla Dunlap-Kaan, one of the stars of Pumping Iron II.
The conversations at a time of loss brought me back to my earliest days with my father and the bodybuilding giants. An old friend of my father’s stopped me at the church. It was Wayne DeMilia, who had run a professional bodybuilding association years earlier and had often been my father’s guide into the bodybuilding underground.
“This is not the time to talk about it, but I want to update you on a possible investigation,” he said. At a meeting weeks later, he presented alarming stories of recent abuse.
Since then, in dozens of interviews with some of the sport’s most knowledgeable people, my Washington Post colleagues and I have uncovered disturbing allegations about the world’s top bodybuilding federations — and athlete exploitation.
Exploited for decades, female bodybuilders speak out
A Washington Post investigation found that numerous female athletes were sexually exploited by officials from the two major US bodybuilding federations.
When I began investigating earlier this year, I went to Schwarzenegger’s annual competition, the Arnold Classic, one of the two most important competitions in the sport. The most famous bodybuilder of all time has also expressed skepticism about elements of contemporary sport, particularly the extreme use of steroids, which has pumped athletes’ musculature far beyond the ideal to something approaching the grotesque. The abuse has resulted in a staggering number of athletes dying young. In response, Schwarzenegger has increased prize money for a competition category called “Classic Physique,” which harks back to the muscular aesthetic of his own heyday.
My admiration for the sweat and determination that drives top bodybuilders remains. But where my father once trained his cameras on the great personalities of athletes, our coverage focuses on the sport’s stewards and where they have taken him since 1977. It’s a more critical look at the odd subculture captured in Pumping Iron. because our job as investigative reporters is to expose and hold accountable injustices.
Do you have a tip about the bodybuilding world? Email reporters at [email protected]
From left: Franco Columbu with an unknown cameraman and George Butler during the shooting of Pumping Iron. (George Butler/contact press photos)
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