Far From Routine: Ellogon's Treasures Part 1

Since 2009, YouTuber "Ellogon" has been building probably the most amazing female muscle contest collection that (as far as I know) exists. Unsurprisingly, many of your suggestions for this week's posts led me to clips uploaded to their channel, and on top of that, I found that many of my own favourite routines (or at least the very best versions of them that are available) were right there on that same channel too.

In fact, so numerous were the nominations from Ellogon's channel that I thought it best (especially after yesterday's, er, let's say "festival of excitement") to split our collective tribute to their work into two parts. Today, two reader requests, and a couple of Swell picks from three famous names from the good old "Golden Age".
That two of them are both requests and favourites of mine just goes to show that it's true what they say that great female muscle lovin' minds really do think alike!


Reader Request/Swell Pick

NATALIA MURNIKOVIENE
1994 IFBB Worlds

The best leg definition in the show, says the Eurosport commentator, an accolade that Natalia could claim in most of the shows she competed in during her career. Her performance here has just about everything that you could possibly want from a routine. Dance moves, flexibility and gymnastics, hard flexing through gritted teeth, oh so expressive, crawling across the stage like a silky, powerful pantheress on heat...




Swell Pick

YOLANDA HUGHES
1997 Ms International

Dubbed "The Queen of Mobile Muscle", Yolanda performs her way to the first of her two Ms International triumphs. If Natalia's routine has everything you could want, Yolanda's has that and a whole bunch of other stuff you never dreamed possible.



For my money, every routine Yolanda ever performed is worth a watch, a second watch, and a third, fourth and fifth as well. If you fancy a bit more of her WOW factor, you might like to check her out at the 1991 NPC USAs, a Ms Olympia I'm not sure of the date of, and the 1993 Ms Olympia (no sound, but my personal favourite posing suit).


Reader Request/Swell Pick

MELISSA COATES
1997 Ms International

And from the same show, the best advertisement for not getting cosmetic surgery back when she was the best advertisement for female bodybuilding. In those days Melissa could have come on with a paintbrush, painted a bit of the stage and watched it dry and it would have been sexy, so this performance must have threatened the trouser fabric of many an audience member. My personal highlight comes just before the 1.00 mark - the little "hula hoop" move followed by an abs and thigh pose. Major swoonage.




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...