In June of 1969, one month before a man stepped on the moon, two months before the Woodstock music festival, and three months before the fourth Mr. Olympia, another epochal event occurred. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sergio Oliva, destined to be arguably bodybuilding’s greatest rivals, trained together in Chicago. Ever since, it’s been shrouded in mystery with only two chummy, non-training photos capturing the event. We found a third—a training shot!—and we’ve assembled remembrances from those few who were there. This is the story of what happened when these two icons—one from Austria, the other from Cuba—got together in a YMCA basement and traded sets three months before they first traded poses on a Brooklyn stage.
DUNCAN YMCA
Bob Gajda (1940-2022) was a bodybuilding pioneer, one of the first to bridge the laboratory with the stage. After obtaining a black belt in judo as a teenager and serving a stint in the Air Force, where he taught martial arts, Gajda earned a B.A. in physical education before studying biomechanics at the doctoral level. The Chicagoan developed the Peripheral Heart Action (PHA) circuit training method, which prescribed alternating between upper and lower body exercises without rest. But Gajda wasn’t just some egghead exercise scientist. He had begun entering bodybuilding contests as a teenager and progressed to the highest amateur ranks. Ultimately, he won the 1966 AAU Mr. America in a very controversial decision over his close friend, Sergio Oliva.
Both bodybuilders trained, often together, at the Joseph S. Duncan YMCA at 1515 West Monroe on the west side of Chicago, Illinois. This was a time when commercial weight-training gyms were rare, even in major cities. Gajda was the trailblazer who brought weights to the Duncan Y, circa 1960, and he was that gym’s director until the mid-’60s. With the rise of Gajda in the muscle magazines and the arrival of Cuban emigree Sergio Oliva to Duncan in 1963, the reputation of the basement weight room grew. By the time Oliva won the 1967 Mr. Olympia, the Duncan Y was known as the “Midwest Muscle Factory.”
Chicago’s Duncan YMCA is no longer at the same location. That building, just a couple blocks from the United Center and Michael Jordan statue, kept the historical YMCA facade but is now full of luxury apartments.
ARNOLD AND SERGIO: 1969
In June 1969, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 21. At the behest of bodybuilding tycoon Joe Weider, he had immigrated to America from Austria (by way of Germany) nine months prior and was living in an apartment in Santa Monica, California, promoting Weider products. (His best friend, Franco Columbu would immigrate that summer, and they would launch a bricklaying business.) His English was shaky. He trained in the original Gold’s Gym near the Pacific Ocean in Venice, trading sets with Dave Draper and other legends. After losing the 1968 IFBB Mr. Universe to Frank Zane when he first set foot in America the previous September, pale and smooth and over-confident, Arnold had been promoted heavily in Weider’s magazines ever since, as if being transformed via Weider’s supplements and training techniques. (Arnold first met Sergio at that ’68 contest, where Sergio guest-posed.) But Arnold was a phenom as a teenager back in Europe, and he’d already won the 1967 NABBA Mr. Universe and 1968 NABBA Pro Mr. Universe, arguably more prestigious titles than the Mr. Olympia then. That June, he was the talk of the bodybuilding world, the one man who realistically had a chance to dethrone “The Myth.”
Sergio Oliva was 27. A member of the Cuban weightlifting team, he escaped his native communist country and became a refugee in America in 1962 and settled in Chicago the next year. He too was a bodybuilding phenom, and when he was denied the 1966 AAU Mr. America, he switched to Weider’s IFBB, winning the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia in 1967 and the Olympia again, unopposed, in 1968. He was married and worked long, hot days in a foundry before working out at the Duncan Y. His English too was shaky. Though he was the reigning Mr. Olympia, he received much less magazine coverage than Arnold, undoubtedly because of his brown skin, but also because he lived in the middle of the country while Weider was headquartered on the East Coast with photographers and writers (and Arnold) on the West Coast. Though Sergio Oliva was the world’s best bodybuilder, he was an enigma. He was “The Myth.”
So, Joe Weider decided to send Arnold to train with Sergio during a long weekend (June 13-15) when the AAU Mr. America was being staged at Chicago’s DePaul University. Another Duncan YMCA member then, Al Yakich, recalled on a recent podcast: “Well, the cool story about the ’69 Mr. America, this is when Arnold Schwarzenegger was sent by Weider to find out what exactly did Sergio do. How did he train? What did you see? I had dinner with Weider in 2004 and he openly admitted, he said, ‘I wasn’t making any money with this guy [Oliva]. He was driving me nuts.’ So, he figured, Schwarzenegger was going to be his boy, send him to Chicago to find out.”
ARNOLD AND SERGIO: THE WORKOUT
If the world’s top two bodybuilders today—Samson Dauda and Derek Lunsford—trained together, for real, say, Lunsford traveling to England to do Dauda’s workout in Dauda’s private gym, it would be all over their Instagram and YouTube feeds, capturing every angle of every rep, every quip. Two decades ago, it would’ve been featured in a major FLEX magazine article. (For FLEX, I covered young Phil Heath following Mr. O Jay Cutler through a brutal back workout in Vegas as Kevin Horton snapped photos; and we did several similar, paired workouts: Ronnie Coleman and Jay Cutler, Phil Heath and Dexter Jackson, etc.)
But the curious thing about the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sergio Oliva 1969 workout(s) is the lack of coverage then. There was no muscle magazine article. No quotes about what occurred. Almost nothing. Just a photo of the two sweaty giants seated together post-workout. There is also a second, similar photo, a sideview of them standing together. In a British magazine of the era, Peak Muscle Maker, we recently uncovered a third photo—an actual training shot! Is it the only one, or is there a trove somewhere waiting to be discovered?
Mostly what we know about this epic clash of the titans comes from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second autobiography, Total Recall:
After that visit to New York [staying with Joe and Betty Weider], I flew to Chicago to see the AAU’s Mr. America contest and spend a week training with Sergio Oliva. We’d be competing that fall, but that didn’t get in the way of his hospitality. He and his wife had me to dinner at their apartment, and I received my first exposure to Cuban Latino culture. Sergio had a jive way of talking and dressing and a different way of relating to his wife than I’d ever seen, with lots of temper and hollering on both sides. Even so, he was a true gentleman.
I was on a secret reconnaissance mission: I thought that you have to sneak into the enemy camp and experience how he sees the world! What is it that makes him a champion? What does he eat, how does he live, what is there to learn from the way he trains? How does he practice his posing? What is his attitude about his competition? None of this information would give me the body to beat him, but it would motivate me and show me what I needed to win. Could I find a weakness I could use psychologically? I was convinced that sports are not just physical but also psychological warfare.
The first thing I discovered was that Sergio worked even harder than me. He had a full-time job at a steel mill, and, after spending all day in the heat of the furnaces, he’d go to the Duncan YMCA and train for hours. He was one of those guys that just didn’t burn up easily. Every day, to start his routine, he would compete 10 sets of 20 [reps of] chin-ups. That wasn’t for training his back. That was just to warm up. Every day. He had a number of unusual techniques that I could pick up. He did his bench press as half reps without ever locking out his elbows. That kept full tension all the time on his pectorals muscle, and he had beautiful, full pecs. There were also things I learned in the way that he practiced his posing….But above all it was the fire in Sergio that inspired me. I said to myself that I would have to step it up.
Al Yakich said of the workout: “So, Arnold says to Sergio at the 69 Mr. America says, ‘I want to train with you.’ Sergio said, ‘Fine. I train at Duncan Y, it’s at 1515 West Monroe, show up we’ll train.’ Then he showed up and then Sergio promptly mopped the floor with him. No way in the world that Arnold could keep up with Sergio, in anything, benches, squats, chins, dips. And I mean I’m openly admitting, I was in the middle of the workout, and he said, ‘I’m done.’”
Joe Weider supposedly called Arnold Schwarzenegger nightly peppering him about all he had learned from Sergio Oliva.
ARNOLD AND SERGIO: POSTSCRIPT
Three months later, on September 13 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, Sergio Oliva defeated Arnold Schwarzenegger to win the 1969 Mr. Olympia. It was the Myth’s third and final Olympia title. The next year, Arnold bested Oliva twice, at the Mr. World and the Mr. Olympia. Oliva was not allowed to competed in the 1971 Mr. Olympia, which Arnold won unopposed. The two titans clashed once more, at the 1972 Mr. Olympia, with Arnold winning a third time, controversially because Sergio was at his best. Arnold Schwarzenegger ultimately won the Mr. Olympia seven times. Three-time Mr. O Sergio Oliva, forever “The Myth,” died in 2012.
