Arnold conquers the 1974 Mr. Olympia. / George Butler
The 1974 Mr. Olympia was a turning point. Arnold Schwarzenegger presented his best-ever physique. Young Lou Ferrigno made his much-anticipated Olympia debut. Future Mr. O’s Franco Columbu and Frank Zane battled in the new under-200 class. It was the first Olympia staged at the prestigious Madison Square Garden. And Sports Illustrated covered it all respectfully in a story that presented Arnold and the Olympia to a massive, mainstream audience. Even before Pumping Iron, this was bodybuilding’s coming out party.
Let’s journey back to New York City—two months after Nixon resigned and two weeks before Ali and Forman rumbled in the jungle—for another seminal event: the 1974 Mr. Olympia.
1974 MR. OLYMPIA: PRELUDE
Arnold Schwarzenegger turned 27 in 1974 and had won the previous four Mr. Olympias, vanquishing his only true rival, three-time Mr. Olympia Sergio Oliva. He hadn’t lost a bodybuilding contest since his debut Mr. Olympia in 1969 (Oliva won). And now Hollywood was noticing the charismatic muscleman with the strange name. He appeared in a TV special with Lucille Ball that year.
Arnold wrote this in his autobiography Total Recall:
I had to be careful not to let my adventures in television sidetrack me from training. In July, Franco and I shifted to workouts at maximum effort twice a day to get ready for the competitions of the fall. I was defending my Mr. Olympia title for the fourth straight year, but in some ways it was far from routine. For the first time, the contest was going to be at Madison Square Garden, New York City’s top location for rock concerts and sports. True, we were in the 4500-seat Felt Forum rather than the 21,000-seat arena. But still, Madison Square Garden was where people came to see Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fight for the first time and to watch Wilt Chamberlain and Willis Reed play. It was where they came to listen to Frank Sinatra and to the Rolling Stones. [Sinatra performed in the Felt Forum the day after the 1974 Mr. Olympia, immortalized in the TV special Sinatra: The Main Event. The Olympia was also staged there in 1984 and 1998.]
So bodybuilding was taking a big step up. People had seen me on TV. The book Pumping Iron was about to come out. And thanks to George Butler’s tireless networking, the 1974 Mr. Olympia contest was getting buzz like it never had before….Joe Weider’s magazine writers outdid themselves working to whip up excitement for this event, calling it “the Super Bowl of bodybuilding.” The venue was a “modern Roman Colosseum.” The contestants were “gladiators in a mortal vascular combat.” The event itself was “the great muscle war of ’74” and “the battle of the titans.”
This year’s drama revolved around bodybuilding’s new wunderkind, Lou Ferrigno, a six-foot-five, 265-pound giant from Brooklyn. He was only 22 and getting better and better each year. He’d won both Mr. America and Mr. Universe in 1973, and now he was training to knock me off as Mr. Olympia. They were hyping Lou as the new Arnold. He had a terrific frame, wide shoulders, incredible abs, out-of-this-world potential, and nothing else on his mind except training and winning.
I loved being the champ. But how much more was there to prove after winning Mr. Olympia four straight years? Plus, my businesses were growing, and maybe I had the start of a movie career. As we trained for New York, I made up my mind that this Mr. Olympia would be my last.
1974 MR. OLYMPIA: PREJUDGING
Starting at 1:00, some 2000 spectators settled into their seats to watch the Mr. America, Mr. World, and Mr. Olympia prejudging. Admission was $4. A journalist wrote of the Mr. Olympia in Muscle Builder magazine:
Afternoon prejudging set the tone for all placings. I don’t believe any decisions were altered at night. At Mr. Olympia prejudging, I thought Zane might edge past Columbu, but he couldn’t match [the] most muscular [pose] with Franco and that cost him. This was also the very first time master and protégé, Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno, banged heads, or should I say bodies. Louie had Arnold breathing heavy but less than Sergio used to. Louie has been bigger, but smoother. He was huge at the LA Mr. International show [that summer] but lacking cuts. Here, the cuts were deep and razored-in, but the size diminished, and somewhere in that gap lies Arnold’s clear-cut win.
1974 MR. OLYMPIA: FINALS
The 8:00 PM evening show nearly sold out all 4500 seats. It began with a country and western band, followed by a deadlifting exhibition from Franco Columbu. Franco, who weighed 181 pounds, deadlifted 645 pounds for five reps, which equals an incredible 726 for a single. In his thickly accented English, he then told the crowd the bar felt as light as “cheesecake.” Bob Birdsong won the Mr. America. Bill Grant won the Mr. World.
And then came the Mr. Olympia. Though there were only four competitors, there were, for the first time, two weight class: under-200 pounds and over-200 pounds. This bifurcation lasted through the rest of the ’70s. It did make a certain amount of sense for this contest to divide the quartet into twosomes since the size chasm was so great: two men with an averaged weight of 185.5 and two others with an averaged weight of 251.
The under-200 pound class presented an interesting clash of physique types with the ultra-thick and wide 5’5″, 181-pound Columbu (a precursor for recent Mr. O’s Hadi Choopan and Derek Lunsford) against the slim, aesthetic 5’9″, 190-pound Frank Zane (a precursor for today’s men’s physique and classic physique athletes). The Sports Illustrated journalist wrote: “When the competition began, it was immediately evident that Columbu would defeat Zane and win that class. Next to the dense, muscular Italian, Zane looked almost willowy.” [Columbu went on to win the Mr. Olympia twice (1976, 1981); Zane won it three times (1977-79).]
In the over-200 pound class, 22-year-old Lou Ferrigno had seemingly boundless potential. His father had boasted that if he beat Arnold that year, Lou would hold the title for a decade, and the statement didn’t seem outlandish.
Arnold wrote of Lou Ferrigno in ’74:
He was massive and symmetrical [but] he was still unrefined like me when I first came to America, and his posing needed work. If I’d had his body, I could have shaped it in a month to beat anyone—even me….I knew how he must have felt about me. He’d been a fan of mine growing up, and so he now saw me the way that I had once seen Sergio Oliva: as the champion he would ultimately have to beat.
But Lou Ferrigno couldn’t beat Arnold Schwarzenegger, not that year, and not the year after. And then they both left the Olympia stage for Hollywood soundstages.
This was Arnold’s show. He had never been bigger or better in a bodybuilding contest. The Muscle Builder writer enthused:
Arnold, a solid 237, is a Rolls Royce Corniche or the Tiffany Diamond—Best Of The Best. There is no greater thrill in all muscledom than watching the thunderstruck masses when Arnold flashes his double biceps pose. Stark raving lunacy and hero worship. Deep visceral screams from the seats, wave after wave of them until the knocked-out throng collapses in jubilant exhaustion.
In his autobiography, Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote:
At Madison Square Garden that night, it wasn’t even close. By the final pose-off Lou was looking depressed, like a rookie who’d made a mistake. And he had. He’d tried so hard to add muscle definition that he’d lost too much weight, so his big body actually looked stringy and less muscular than mine. Onstage in front of a capacity crowd, I copied his poses, doing each one better than him.
The Sports Illustrated journalist observed:
The crowd responded with wild shouts of encouragement as Schwarzenegger and his young opponent took the stage. Spotlights and oil highlighted their muscles. As they moved through their poses, Schwarzenegger’s superiority began to show. At one point they turned and found themselves face-to-face, both locked in arm shots, veins popping and foreheads glistening, their bodies trembling with effort. Schwarzenegger looked at Ferrigno and smiled, as if to say, “You are beaten.” It was a boxer psyching his opponent, and the crowd knew it and so did the judges. Once more Arnold Schwarzenegger was Mr. Olympia.
1974 MR. OLYMPIA: EPILOGUE
Arnold wrote of the rest that night in Manhattan:
Franco and I didn’t stick around for very long after the contest; we ducked out with the Weiders and my old friend Albert Busek, who had flown from Munich to cover the event, to go to the Pumping Iron book party at Delfina’s. [The book was released the next month. The documentary of the same name came three years later. Delfina Rattazzi was an heiress to the Fiat fortune.] The moment I walked in the door, I was the rookie. Delfina had a giant three-floor apartment, very decorated, very hip. There were paintings on the ceilings rather than on the walls so you could lie around getting stoned and look up and see art. An endless stream of people filled the huge rooms….I could see that it was kind of a Euro-thing, with people very sophisticated, with their clothes, or lack thereof, gay people, strange people—everything was there. All I could do was shake my head and say, “This is going to be an interesting life.”
That life would only grow more and more interesting from thereon as show business called. With nothing more to prove, Arnold Schwarzenegger intended the 1974 Mr. Olympia as his swan song. He was more certain of this when he was cast in the movie Stay Hungry, which shot in the spring of 1975, but the filming of Pumping Iron (and a $50,000 payday) would pull him into another Mr. Olympia lineup that November, and he would make a comeback for one more, his seventh win, in 1980. Still, before or after, Arnold Schwarzenegger never topped the musculature he displayed at “the battle of the titans” in Madison Square Garden in 1974.
1974 MR. OLYMPIA RESULTS
October 12, 1974 / Madison Square Garden / New York City
Under 200 Pounds
1. Franco Columbu
2. Frank Zane
Over 200 Pounds
1. Arnold Schwarzenegger
2. Lou Ferrigno
Overall
Arnold Schwarzenegger ($1000)
