Far From Routine: Your Top 3

We're not talking about Hot and Hard 100 numbers of votes, and as I mentioned the other day, there were a handful of reader nominations that didn't make it to the FMS inbox in time for this week's posts, so it looks like we'll be revisiting this theme again in the near future, but today's three routines all received multiple mentions.

Here they are then, your...

Most Requested

3 DENISE MASINO
2004 Ms Olympia

The aspect ratio is a bit wrong, but that doesn't seem to worry those who voted. A number of the ladies at the 2004 Ms Olympia took up the chance to incorporate some kind of costume into their posing routines, but Denise's headgear has proved to have been by far the most memorable. Sexiest routine ever! one reader exclaims, and as our old friend JL, on whose YouTube channel the clip resides, points out, Denise is fully aware of her incredible sex appeal, and the xxxcitement and desire that she causes!




2 DENISE RUTKOWSKI
1993 Ms Olympia

One of the more well-known routines in the history of female bodybuilding, I'd say, and for good reason. She is really walking the line here as to what's acceptable on stage and what isn't, says Carla Dunlap on the commentary. It's so easy to interpret so many things in bodybuilding as "sexual". Indeed. And if your comments are anything to go by, there's no doubt how the collective you interpret Denise's "golden" routine. The beautiful bronzed angel in the gold bikini, one reader calls her. If she didn't define true beauty, I don't know who did. She's the reason I became interested in this sport.




1 LAURA BINETTI
1997 Ms International

I have to admit I was initially somewhat surprised that Laura's 1997 Ms International routine proved to be the most popular with readers, but having watched (and rewatched) this gem - appropriately available courtesy of Ellogon's YouTube channel - I'm a lot less surprised now. Bronzed, oiled and as one reader puts it, "as built as a tank", every pose Laura hits reveals breathtaking muscularity. And, despite some lively music, her style appeals to members of the "take it slow" posing fan club. And all in a posing suit from the days before the point of them seemed to be to cover up as much as possible. No wonder the crowd reacted as they did. How can I forget this routine? says our old friend JL. One of the biggest loads, and the best orgasms I xxxperienced in 1997. It seems that nearly twenty years after she performed it, your collective all-time favourite routine is still giving many of you more than a feeling!




Thanks to all of you who got in touch. As I noted above, if your favourite didn't appear this week, don't panic. Not all your suggestions were received in time to put the posts together, so we'll be having another week of "all-time favourite" routines on FMS real soon. If you haven't voted yet, please do! Send your list to 6ft1swell@gmail.com. Links to the routines would be great or you can send me files of the clips instead.

Enjoy!

Treasures from the Archive: Ms Olympia Memories: Part I The Magazine Years

Can't say I remember too clearly what it was like having to follow the Ms Olympia a month (or two) after it had actually happened through the pages of Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Ironman and so on, but whenever I come across an image of Cory Everson with a big medal around her neck, flanked by one or both of the Weiders and/or one or both of the women who made up the top three that year, her arms held aloft, it invariably seems familiar, and takes me back to those early magazine years.



Then, as far as my teenage female muscle obsessive self was concerned anyway, the result was a given. The Ms Olympia was not so much a contest as the annual coronation of the most physically perfect woman in the world. And clearly that was Cory.



In those days you were never exactly starved of images of her to drool over (especially in Weider publications), but for me it was the pics of Cory on stage that were always the most drool-worthy, so the Olympia editions were prized possessions. The tan, the oil, the striations, the muscles, and, I particularly remember, the bikini bottoms so tight that I was forced to spend hours, possibly days, of my life just looking (slightly puzzled at that tender age) at whatever was making that shape between her legs!



But, of course, there were other women, and in those very early days Anja Langer was, I reckoned, probably the second most physically perfect woman in the world... The judges didn't see it my way (not for the last time) in 1987 (left, below) when she finished 4th, but in 1988 (right) Anja was runner-up to (of course!) Cory Everson.



These days, I'm convinced that the reason I've found myself reacting so positively to the Physique division (much more positively than I'd expected to when it was first announced) is largely because the aesthetic is so reminiscent of Anja's and the other female bodybuilders' at the time I first discovered my love of female muscle. Over 25 years later, it seems I'm still programmed to respond to this "classical" aesthetic.

And staying in those early years (but not in the sense that it was an image I saw in a magazine), a screencap of Gladys Portugues during her routine at the 1986 Ms Olympia. It was intended for posting earlier in the year when FMS explored The Agony & the Ecstasy experienced by female bodybuilders when prepping and competing.



Now I've seen women (and men) looking this deliriously happy before, but they tended to be in sweaty clubs set up in old railway arches in the late 1990s and all of them had ingested a substance whose effects gave it its name. I doubt Gladys had had any of that, nor that she looked so ecstatic because Jean-Claude had promised to buy her a dog. This is what pure, unadulterated, Olympian female muscle ecstasy looks like!



We return to my formative female muscle lovin' years with three of the most "exotic" (to a teenage boy in a London suburb anyway!) and, therefore, most exciting women I had the pleasure of seeing inside the covers of the magazines containing Olympia reports. Future Ms Olympia Juliette Bergmann (above left) seemed, I recall, almost impossibly beautiful, and was probably responsible for my eagerness to visit Holland - much more so than the more conventional attractions for a young man. Marie-Laure Mahabir (above right) seemed to be from a different planet altogether.



The months when pictures from the Olympia appeared in the magazines tended to be the only ones featuring European-based FBBs like Marie-Laure, and I guess because I had seen so few images of them it made them all the more exciting - they were more memorable because they were so rare. Their placing at the show was utterly irrelevant to me, though perhaps it did cross my mind how such a magnificently sensual creature like Claudia Profanter could possibly finish 14th (as she did in '91).



But while it may have been an advantage to be European to get Swell's attention (or maybe that should be to bring Swell to attention), it was by no means necessary. As my teenage years drew to a close, Denise Rutkowski's feline power and unforgettable gold bikini proved an irresistible combination. And, for the first time in my life, I was, actually, trying to resist the lure of female muscle in order to appear all normal and stuff as I left school and moved away to university.

[Incidentally, if you are the sort who likes to know how the FBBs of your youth are looking now I am honour-bound to warn you that YOU SHOULD NOT TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT DENISE RUTKOWSKI LOOKS LIKE NOW. I had the misfortune to see, and it is haunting me. Really. Trust me. DON'T.]



And though I regularly fell off the wagon, discovering the likes of Denise, Yolanda Hughes and Natalia Murnikoviene (above, left and right respectively) when I did, I think of that first effort at repressing my desire to view images of female bodybuilders as the end of "The Magazine Years". By the time I re-embraced my sthenolagnia in the late '90s, I didn't need to rely on the mainstream muscle magazines for my fix - there was Women's Physique World and, a bit later, Muscle Elegance. It's rather ironic (and quite fitting) then that I couldn't actually find a magazine scan of Yolanda at the Olympia from a muscle magazine, and instead had to use a WPW pic.

Oh, look! It's Cory winning again...



And I leave you for today with Denise Rutkowski as I would like to remember her, performing her (I think it's fair to say) LEGENDARY routine from 1993. She finished second, and by all accounts that I know of, should have won.

On this evidence, it's easy to see why people would have thought so.

(If you've already got the box of tissues in in preparation for the excitement of this Friday's 2014 meat-fest, now might be a good time to crack them open...)



Enjoy!

More Ms O memories coming soon...