Women

A sport women built and then had taken over. The first official contest was the Ohio Regional Women's Physique Championship in Canton, Ohio, in November 1977, organised by Henry McGhee and won by Gina LaSpina, judged on bodybuilding rather than beauty criteria. Doris Barrilleaux founded the SPA in 1978, the first women's bodybuilding organisation run by and for women, and McGhee's USWPA followed. The Ms. Olympia arrived in 1980 and absorbed all of it. Then came four decades of rules aimed at size: the 1992 IFBB guidance that competitors should not be too big, and a 2004 memo asking female athletes to reduce muscularity by roughly a fifth for aesthetics and health. No male equivalent has ever existed. Rachel McLish, Bev Francis, Cory Everson, Lenda Murray, Kim Chizevsky, and the divisions invented to catch the women judged too muscular for the last one.

Part of Bodybuilding

139 moments in this segment.

1. 1854 - Madame Caplin's chest expander. From Roxey Ann Caplin's Health and Beauty, 1854. Caplin argued for muscular development in women through resistance apparatus at a point when the corset was the assumed instrument of female form.
2. 1854 - Chest expander exercise, plate two. Caplin's apparatus plates are among the earliest published depictions of a woman using resistance equipment for the express purpose of building the body.
3. 1854 - Chest expander exercise, plate four. Health and Beauty was published in London in 1854, more than twenty years before Sandow left Prussia.
4. 1890 - Strongwoman, from Acrobats and Mountebanks. From the 1890 volume Acrobats and Mountebanks. The music hall and circus were the only public venues where a muscular woman could perform, and the strongwoman act was a recognised bill item across Europe.
5. 1898 - Madame H. Cloutier, strongwoman. A La Presse article on Madame H. Cloutier, a young Canadian athlete who set out to repeat the feats of Louis Cyr. Women performed strength acts on the same circuit as the men.
6. 1898 - Charmion at the Folies-Bergere. Laverie Vallee, 1875 to 1949, performed as Charmion, a trapeze strongwoman act. The Folies-Bergere poster is the promotional face of a career that put a visibly muscular woman on a Paris stage nightly.
7. 1898 - Charmion at the end of her act. Photographed by Alfred Ellis, 7 September 1898. Charmion's act combined trapeze work with displays of strength and muscular development.
8. 1898 - Laverie Cooper, seated. Charmion off stage. Her Edison-filmed Trapeze Disrobing Act of 1901 made her one of the earliest women photographed in motion for a mass audience.
9. 1898 - Charmion at the Folies-Bergere, lithograph. A lithographic poster from the Musee Carnavalet collection. The strongwoman act was a paid stage engagement with no contest structure at all, and it preceded competitive women's bodybuilding by roughly seventy years.
10. 1898 - Charmion, strongwoman. Laverie Vallee, 1875 to 1949, billed as a strongwoman. Her Edison-filmed Trapeze Disrobing Act of 1901 made her one of the earliest women recorded in motion for a mass audience.
11. 1900 - Anna Abs. From the George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress. Abs was one of a cohort of professional strongwomen working the American variety circuit at the turn of the century.
12. 1900 - Anna Abs, second study. The Bain news service photographed strongwomen as news subjects, which is why an unusually complete free-licensed record of them survives.
13. 1900 - Katie Sandwina, the Lady Hercules. Katharina Brumbach, 1884 to 1952, performed as Sandwina, a name built to echo Sandow's. She headlined for Barnum and Bailey.
14. 1900 - Sandwina holding three men. The lift is the act's signature. As with the male strongmen of the same circuit, the promotional weights and measurements should be read as showmanship rather than record.
15. 1900 - Star of vaudeville. Vaudeville was one of the few paid public arenas in which a visibly muscular woman could work, and it was an entertainment economy rather than a sporting one.
16. 1901 - Woman's Physical Development, January 1901. Bernarr Macfadden published Woman's Physical Development from 1900. Macfadden's physical culture publishing empire addressed women directly, decades before any organisation would run a contest for them.
17. 1901 - Woman's Physical Development, August 1901. Macfadden ran the first major American physique contest at Madison Square Garden over the 1903 to 1904 New Year, won by Al Treloar. His women's title had no comparable prominence.
18. 1901 - Woman's Physical Development, December 1901. The magazine's existence is evidence that a female physical culture readership was commercially real in 1901.
19. 1904 - Laverie Vallee as Charmion. Photographed by Frederick Whitman Glasier, whose circus work is the best single photographic archive of the American variety strength acts.
20. 1904 - Charmion in a pair of poses. Glasier's paired study. Charmion is catalogued on Commons as a bodybuilder, which is a later reading of what was billed at the time as a strength and trapeze act.
21. 1904 - Miss Charmion. The strongwoman act preceded competitive women's bodybuilding by roughly seventy years and had no contest structure at all. It was paid performance, not sport.
22. 1904 - Charmion on the trapeze. The trapeze framing let a muscular woman be presented as an aerialist, a legible variety category, rather than as a strength athlete.
23. 1904 - Charmion posing on the trapeze. The trapeze framing allowed a muscular woman to be presented as an aerialist, a legible variety category, rather than as a strength athlete in her own right.
24. 1906 - Charmion flexes for the camera. A deliberate muscular display for the lens. Photographs like this are the closest early twentieth century equivalent to a physique shot of a woman, made seventy years before any contest would judge one.
25. 1909 - Charmion, back. Dated May 1909. The back study is a physique convention, and its use here on a woman is decades ahead of any contest that would judge it.
26. 1911 - Marguerite Martyn's sketch of Sandwina. Drawn for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 June 1911, by the newspaper artist Marguerite Martyn. The sketch is imaginative rather than documentary and the archive presents it as such.
27. 1911 - Marguerite Martyn draws Sandwina. The newspaper artist Marguerite Martyn drew herself into the sketch alongside Sandwina, for the St Louis Post-Dispatch of 4 June 1911. Sandwina was a leading figure in the circus performers' suffrage organisation, which links the strongwoman act directly to the women's political movement.
28. 1912 - Katie Sandwina. Sandwina was a leading figure in the circus performers' suffrage organisation, which links the strongwoman act directly to the women's political movement of the period.
29. 1924 - Billed as the strongest woman in the world, Berlin. Berlin, April 1924. Titles like this were promotional claims made by performers and promoters, with no adjudicating body behind them.
30. 1934 - Langridge's School of Physical Culture, Sydney. Women of Langridge's School of Physical Culture performing in Sydney on 6 September 1934, photographed for the Sun newspaper.
31. 1934 - Women's class, Bjelke-Petersen School of Physical Culture. Photographed by Sam Hood in Sydney. The Bjelke-Petersen schools ran women's physical culture classes in Australia from the 1890s, one of the longest-running such programmes anywhere.
32. 1934 - Class exercise, Bjelke-Petersen School. Physical culture for women was framed institutionally as health and posture, not as development for display. That framing held until the 1970s.
33. 1934 - Bjelke-Petersen School, Sydney. Group drill rather than individual loading. Barbell work for women was outside the accepted programme.
34. 1941 - Women's PT (1941). British Pathe newsreel of the Women's League of Health and Beauty exercising in formation in London. The League, founded by Mary Bagot Stack in 1930, was mass physical culture for women decades before anything called women's bodybuilding existed, and it was drill and callisthenics rather than resistance training.
35. 1953 - Ed Fury and Jackie Coey. Photographed for the Los Angeles Daily News. Women appeared in Muscle Beach photography largely as partners in adagio and balancing acts rather than as physique competitors in their own right.
36. 1954 - Girl Weight Lifters (1954). British Pathe footage of women lifting weights at a gym in Paddington, London, with an instructor correcting technique. Filmed in the same decade that Abbye Stockton was running women's barbell classes at Muscle Beach, and it shows how unusual the sight was thought to be, since the newsreel treats it as a curiosity.
37. 1970 - Jacki Sorensen at an Aerobic Dancing event. Sorensen's Aerobic Dancing was one of the vehicles that put organised exercise for women into American commercial life in the 1970s, the decade in which competitive women's bodybuilding was actually founded.
38. 1982 - Ms. Olympia women's bodybuilding 1982 Rachel McLish, Carla Dunlap, Kay Baxter, Kiki Elomaa, and more. The 1982 Ms. Olympia from Atlantic City, with Rachel McLish, Carla Dunlap, Kay Baxter, Kiki Elomaa, Marjo Selin, Gladys Portugues and others. The Ms. Olympia had been running only since 1980, absorbing a sport women had already built through the USWPA and the SPA from 1977 and 1978.
39. 1982 - Rachel McLish 🇺🇸 1st @ 1982 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Rachel McLish taking her second Ms. Olympia title in 1982. McLish had won the inaugural Ms. Olympia in Philadelphia in 1980, where first prize was 10,000 dollars.
40. 1983 - Steve Michalik trains Bev Francis (1983). Steve Michalik training Bev Francis, footage from Pumping Iron II: The Women. The film was shot around the 1983 Caesars Palace World Cup, so the training material predates the 1985 release.
41. 1984 - Rachel McLish - Individual Posing Routine - 1984 Ms.Olympia. Rachel McLish's individual posing routine at the 1984 Ms. Olympia, the year Cory Everson began her run of six consecutive titles.
42. 1984 - Ms Olympia 1984 female bodybuilding championship Rachel McLish Cory Everson Carla Dunlap fbb. The 1984 Ms. Olympia in full, with Rachel McLish, Cory Everson, Carla Dunlap, Mary Roberts, Kay Baxter, Gladys Portugues and Tina Plakinger. Everson won the first of six consecutive titles here.
43. 1985 - Bev Francis Posing Routine in Pumping Iron 2. Bev Francis posing in Pumping Iron II: The Women. Francis came from powerlifting and the film cast her as the limit case of how muscular a woman could be and still be judged. Director George Butler later called the sequel a semi documentary and said he staged the Francis and McLish posedown after Francis had already been eliminated.
44. 1985 - Pumping Iron II - The Women (1985). Pumping Iron II: The Women, George Butler's 1985 sequel, built around the 1983 Caesars Palace World Cup. Butler described it as a semi documentary and said the Francis and McLish posedown was staged after Francis had already been eliminated, so it should be read as a constructed film rather than a record of the contest.
45. 1985 - Siskel & Ebert (1985) - Pumping Iron II: The Women | Rambo: First Blood Part II | Brewsters Millions. Siskel and Ebert reviewing Pumping Iron II: The Women on release in 1985, alongside other films of that week. A contemporaneous critical reaction to the film that introduced muscular women to a mass cinema audience.
46. 1985 - Woman of the 21st Century TV special Rachel McLish female bodybuilder Cynthia Rothrock mid 1980s.. A mid 1980s television special on women in the new physical culture, featuring Rachel McLish alongside martial artist Cynthia Rothrock, Diana Dennis and Raye Hollitt. Shows how broadcast television packaged muscular women for a general audience.
47. 1985 - 1985 Lady of Iron Prejudge. Prejudging at the 1985 Lady of Iron contest. Prejudging is where placings are actually decided, in the compulsory poses and comparisons, and it is rarely filmed.
48. 1985 - Cory Everson 🇺🇸 1st @ 1985 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Cory Everson winning the 1985 Ms. Olympia, the second of six consecutive titles she took from 1984 to 1989.
49. 1986 - Rachel McLish On David Letterman Show 1986. Rachel McLish on the David Letterman show in 1986. Talk show appearances were how the sport reached audiences who would never buy a Weider magazine, and McLish was the athlete the promoters put forward for that.
50. 1987 - Merike Madar, Estonia's first female bodybuilder. Photographed by Jaan Kunnap in Tallinn. Madar is described as Estonia's first woman bodybuilder, competing while the country was still part of the Soviet Union, where bodybuilding had been officially discouraged for long periods.
51. 1987 - Merike Madar. Described as Estonia's first woman bodybuilder, photographed in Tallinn in 1987 while the country was still part of the Soviet Union.
52. 1988 - Cory Everson - Individual Posing Routine - 1988 Ms.Olympia. Cory Everson's individual posing routine at the 1988 Ms. Olympia. Everson's routines were built around dance and presentation as much as muscularity, which is part of why the IFBB held her up as the model.
53. 1990 - Cory Everson's Workout
54. 1990 - 1990 IFBB Ms. Olympia Professional Women's Bodybuilding Full Contest. The 1990 IFBB Ms. Olympia in full, hosted by Cory Everson and Joe Fowler, with the routines of the top sixteen. Lenda Murray won here, beginning six consecutive titles. This is two years before the IFBB introduced its femininity rules.
55. 1990 - Lenda Murray 🇺🇸 1st @ 1990 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Lenda Murray taking the 1990 Ms. Olympia, the first of eight titles.
56. 1991 - 1991 Ms. Olympia Full Original LIVE TV Broadcast. The 1991 Ms. Olympia as a full live television broadcast, including interviews with Ben Weider and Pete Grymkowski and an award presentation for Rachel McLish. Described by the uploader as the only live Ms. Olympia broadcast, it is a rare record of how the sport presented its women to a television audience.
57. 1991 - Bev Francis 🇦🇺 2nd @ 1991 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Australia's Bev Francis placing second at the 1991 Ms. Olympia. Francis came second at the Ms. Olympia repeatedly and never won it, in the years when the IFBB was moving to limit muscularity.
58. 1991 - Lenda Murray. 1990 to 1995, and two more in 2002 and 2003. This photograph is from April 1991, between her first and second.
59. 1992 - Lenda Murray 🇺🇸 1st @ 1992 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Lenda Murray winning the 1992 Ms. Olympia. The IFBB introduced its femininity rules in 1992, with judges instructed to look for a feminine but not emaciated physique and competitors told not to be too big. No equivalent instruction was ever issued to men.
60. 1994 - 1994 NPC Women's Nationals Bodybuilding Championships. The 1994 NPC Women's National Bodybuilding Championships, the amateur contest through which American women earned IFBB professional status.
61. 1995 - In Shape with Rachel McLish. 1995 workout programme. The home video market was where retired competitors made a living, and it is also where the sport's public image was set for people who never watched a contest.
62. 1995 - Lenda Murray 🇺🇸 1st @ 1995 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Lenda Murray's sixth consecutive Ms. Olympia in 1995.
63. 1996 - Kim Chizevsky 🇺🇸 1st @ 1996 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Kim Chizevsky winning the 1996 Ms. Olympia, the first of four consecutive titles.
64. 1997 - 4x Miss Olympia Kim Chizevsky’s Unforgettable 1997 Guest Posing Performance: Restored Rare Footage. Kim Chizevsky guest posing at the 1997 North Coast Championship, restored footage. Guest posing was how professionals earned between contests.
65. 1997 - Ms International, Arnold Classic 1997. The 1997 Ms. International at the Arnold Classic, from the Arnold Sports Festival's own channel. The Ms. International was the second most important women's professional title after the Ms. Olympia.
66. 1997 - Final - Ms. International Arnold Classic 1997. Finals of the 1997 Ms. International at the Arnold Classic.
67. 1999 - 1999 Ms. International Was INSANE 🔥 Best Female Bodybuilding Lineup Ever? (Remastered). Remastered footage of the 1999 IFBB Ms. International, held on Arnold Classic weekend. The 1999 season was the last before the IFBB's pressure on muscularity intensified, and Kim Chizevsky won her fourth and final Ms. Olympia that year.
68. 1999 - Kim Chizevsky 🇺🇸 1st @ 1999 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Kim Chizevsky winning the 1999 Ms. Olympia, her fourth consecutive title. She did not defend it.
69. 2002 - Lenda Murray 🇺🇸 1st @ 2002 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Lenda Murray winning the 2002 Ms. Olympia after returning from retirement, seven years after her sixth consecutive title.
70. 2004 - Iris Kyle 🇺🇸 1st @ 2004 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Iris Kyle winning the 2004 Ms. Olympia. The IFBB issued its 20 percent rule the same year, a directive asking female athletes to decrease muscularity by a factor of 20 percent. It was contested by competitors, not least because nobody defined 20 percent of what.
71. 2006 - Women's bodybuilding and fitness competition, Quebec. Fitness, introduced in the mid 1990s, added a choreographed routine to the physique assessment. Each division introduced after it has been less muscular than the last.
72. 2006 - Figure competition, San Diego. Figure, from around 2003, judged muscularity without the routine and on a less extreme standard than bodybuilding. It absorbed entrants and sponsorship away from the bodybuilding class.
73. 2008 - Ms. Olympia stage, Las Vegas. The 2008 Ms. Olympia in Las Vegas, 26 September 2008. Prize money for the women's title was a fraction of the men's; by 2020 the Ms. Olympia paid 95,000 dollars against 600,000 for Mr Olympia in 2024.
74. 2008 - Iris Kyle at the Ms. Olympia. Iris Kyle won ten Ms. Olympia titles, nine of them consecutive from 2006 to 2014. She is the most decorated bodybuilder of either sex in Olympia history and is almost unknown outside the sport.
75. 2008 - Comparison round, Ms. Olympia. Competitors including Dayana Cadeau and Catherine LeFrancois. The IFBB cancelled the Ms. Olympia after Kyle's final win in 2014 without giving a reason.
76. 2008 - Ms. Olympia line-up. The Rising Phoenix World Championships functioned as the de facto replacement from 2015 to 2019. The Ms. Olympia returned in 2020, coinciding with a change of ownership of the Olympia rather than a change of policy at the IFBB.
77. 2008 - On stage at the Ms. Olympia. A 2004 IFBB directive, the so-called 20 percent rule, asked female athletes to decrease muscularity by a fifth. Competitors contested it in part because it was unmeasurable: nobody defined 20 percent of what.
78. 2008 - Competitors backstage. Whether the proliferation of divisions represents growth, since more women compete than ever, or suppression, since the muscular category was starved, is the live argument in the sport.
79. 2008 - Andrea Lyons. An American competitor in the open bodybuilding class, the division that contracted as figure and later bikini expanded.
80. 2008 - Jen Hendershot in Australia. The women's professional circuit has always been international in its competitors and narrow in its prize money.
81. 2010 - Iris Kyle 🇺🇸 1st @ 2010 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Iris Kyle winning the 2010 Ms. Olympia, part of nine consecutive titles from 2006 to 2014.
82. 2010 - Bodybuilding competition, Contingency Operating Base Basra. A contest held on a US base in Iraq, 29 May 2010. Military welfare programmes have run women's physique contests in places where no civilian circuit existed.
83. 2010 - Jessica Fulton at the Alaska championships. Posing for the judges at the 22nd Annual Professional and Amateur Championships in Anchorage, 2 October 2010.
84. 2010 - Women's Figure winners, Anchorage. Trophy presentation for the women's Figure class over five feet four inches. Height classes remain standard in women's divisions.
85. 2010 - Bikini division, Anchorage. The bikini division had been introduced by the IFBB only that year and would soon become the largest women's category by entries worldwide.
86. 2011-01-11 - Modern Ireland - Supersized Shes. Supersized Shes, an Irish documentary following bodybuilders Inga Beinara and Sophia McNamara through a competitive season.
87. 2011 - Competitor at a military physique contest. Photographed 5 June 2011 by a US Marine Corps photographer. Military welfare programmes have run women's physique contests in places and periods where no civilian circuit was available.
88. 2011 - Erin Stern. A figure competitor. Figure and bikini between them account for the large majority of women's entries at amateur level in most countries.
89. 2011 - IFBB Austria Cup. The IFBB formally recognised women's bodybuilding as a discipline at its 1982 congress in Bruges, four years after Doris Barrilleaux had founded the first women's organisation run by and for women.
90. 2011 - IFBB Austria Talents Cup. A talents-class contest in St Poelten. The IFBB recognised women's bodybuilding as a discipline at its 1982 congress in Bruges, four years after Doris Barrilleaux founded the first women's organisation run by and for women.
91. 2012-09-17 - Rachel McLish: Steroids in Bodybuilding. Rachel McLish, in an interview for the MAKERS oral history project, describing how she believes drug use changed bodybuilding. This is a competitor's own account of the sport she left, not a finding about any individual.
92. 2013 - Dana Linn Bailey 🇺🇸 1st @ 2013 Ms. Olympia (WPD). Dana Linn Bailey winning the first Women's Physique Olympia in 2013. Women's Physique was created to catch athletes considered too muscular for Figure, part of a sequence of new divisions each less muscular than the last.
93. 2013 - 2013 Olympia: WOMEN'S PHYSIQUE Winner Dana Linn Bailey Interview. Dana Linn Bailey interviewed after winning the inaugural Women's Physique Olympia in 2013.
94. 2013 - Muscle Beach Classic, women's heavyweight. Sergeant Odyssey Martin took the women's tall figure and bodybuilding heavyweight classes at the 2013 Muscle Beach Classic, 4 August 2013.
95. 2014-02-04 - The Remarkable Story of Ernestine Shepherd. Prevention Magazine following a day with Ernestine Shepherd, then 77 and competing. Shepherd began training in her fifties.
96. 2014 - Iris Kyle 🇺🇸 1st @ 2014 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Iris Kyle winning the 2014 Ms. Olympia, her tenth title and the last before the contest was cancelled. Kyle is the most decorated Olympia competitor of either sex and is almost unknown outside the sport.
97. 2014 - Iris Kyle 2014 Ms. Olympia Winner. Iris Kyle interviewed by Tony Doherty immediately after winning the 2014 Ms. Olympia. The IFBB cancelled the Ms. Olympia for 2015 without giving a reason.
98. 2014 - Lenda Murray, eight-time Ms. Olympia. In 1992, in the middle of Murray's run, the IFBB introduced femininity rules directing judges to look for a feminine but not emaciated physique and competitors not to be too big. No equivalent instruction was ever issued to men.
99. 2014 - Raye Hollitt. Hollitt competed as a bodybuilder before appearing on American television. Screen work has been one of the few routes to income outside the supplement economy, for women as for men.
100. 2014-08-25 - South Korean women find beauty in bodybuilding - BBC News. BBC News on the growth of women's bodybuilding in South Korea, and how it sits against prevailing expectations of appearance there. One of very few broadcast records of the sport's women outside the West.
101. 2015-05-07 - IFBB Women Bodybuilders Documentary. A documentary on IFBB women bodybuilders, uploaded in 2015, the year the Ms. Olympia was cancelled.
102. 2015 - Shweta Rathore. An Indian female bodybuilder. Non-Western women's bodybuilding is close to absent from the free-licensed photographic record, which is a finding about the archive rather than about the sport.
103. 2015-10-15 - Steroids Female Bodybuilder Joanna Thomas Documentary. A documentary on British professional Joanna Thomas, who earned her IFBB pro card at 21. Thomas has spoken publicly about her own drug use, and the film is built around that account.
104. 2016 - Rita Jairath. An Indian competitor photographed after a win. India's women's divisions developed through the same federation structure as the men's but with far less documentation.
105. 2017-01-12 - Ripped: Inside Women’s Bodybuilding
106. 2017-06-07 - The Last of the Iron Sisters: SWOLE Ep. 2. The second episode of VICE Sports' SWOLE, following competitors through the years when the Ms. Olympia did not exist.
107. 2017 - Beres Alexandra. A Hungarian competitor and fitness figure. Athlete income across the sport comes chiefly from sponsorship rather than prize money.
108. 2017-09-01 - Super Size She. 's bodybuilding is almost entirely undocumented on film, so a student production is a real source here.
109. 2017-12-28 - Keeping Women's Bodybuilding Division Alive: Swole. VICE on the collapse and survival of the women's bodybuilding division. After the IFBB dropped the Ms. Olympia following 2014, the Wings of Strength organisation created the Rising Phoenix World Championships, which ran as the de facto replacement from 2015 to 2019.
110. 2018 - Victoria Posmitna. A Ukrainian female bodybuilder. Eastern European countries saw rapid growth in competitive bodybuilding after the Soviet collapse, in which the sport had been officially discouraged.
111. 2018-11-11 - Idle Training: Scenes of Pleasure at Muscle Beach, 1934-1958 (and what came after). A Brunel University research seminar on Muscle Beach from 1934 to 1958, treating the site as a performance space. Muscle Beach was a 1934 WPA New Deal installation rather than private enterprise, and this talk covers the acrobatic and hand balancing culture in which Abbye Stockton worked.
112. 2019 - Kaliningrad regional championship. A Russian regional championship. The post-Soviet scene grew out of the basement gyms, the kachalki, that had operated outside official sport structures.
113. 2019 - Women's Physique winners, Sweden. The Swedish national championship. Women's Physique was created around 2013 to catch athletes too muscular for Figure after open bodybuilding's contraction.
114. 2019-10-25 - Miss Olympia 6 Time Winner Cory Everson discusses her training and life. Six time Ms. Olympia Cory Everson in a long conversation with Ric Drasin about her training and her life after competition.
115. 2020 - Andrea Shaw 🇺🇸 1st @ 2020 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Andrea Shaw winning the 2020 Ms. Olympia, the contest's return after five years. The return coincided with a change of ownership of the Olympia rather than a change of position at the IFBB.
116. 2020 - Helle Trevino 🇩🇰 3rd @ 2020 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Denmark's Helle Trevino placing third at the 2020 Ms. Olympia, the first edition after the contest returned.
117. 2020 - 2020 Ms. Olympia - IFBB Women's Fitness - Pre/Finals/Awards. Prejudging, finals and awards for IFBB Women's Fitness at the 2020 Olympia in Orlando. Fitness pairs a physique round with a choreographed routine and dates from the mid 1990s.
118. 2020 - Olesya Gureeva. Photographed by the Uzbekistan Bodybuilding Federation. Central Asian women's competition is documented almost solely through federation channels.
119. 2020-12-07 - 2020 Rising Phoenix Women's Bodybuilding Winner - Andrea Shaw. Andrea Shaw winning the 2020 Rising Phoenix, the Wings of Strength contest that stood in for the Ms. Olympia from 2015 to 2019 and continued after its return.
120. 2021-03-28 - Cory Everson Interview - American Muscle Magazine. Cory Everson interviewed for American Muscle Magazine, looking back at her competitive career.
121. 2021 - Ms Israel. Photographed for the Israeli natural bodybuilding federation. Natural federations impose the drug testing that the sport's largest professional league does not.
122. 2021 - Whitney Jones with three Fitness Olympia medals. Whitney Jones took three consecutive Fitness Olympia titles. Fitness, from the mid 1990s, pairs a physique assessment with a choreographed gymnastic routine.
123. 2021-06-20 - Figure to Bodybuilding: The Evolution of Ms. Olympia Andrea Shaw. Andrea Shaw on moving from Figure to bodybuilding, made by Muscle and Fitness. Weider titles are simultaneously the best documented and the least neutral source in this field, so treat the framing as promotional in origin.
124. 2021-07-22 - Bodybuilding was not ready for the strongest woman in the world, Bev Francis | ABC Australia. ABC Australia on Bev Francis, made forty years after she entered the sport. Francis came from powerlifting, where she held world records, and her physique became the argument the sport had about its own limits.
125. 2022-04-09 - 4x Ms Olympia Kim Chizevsky. Four time Ms. Olympia Kim Chizevsky in conversation with Lenda Murray, made by Wings of Strength, the organisation that kept the sport running when the Ms. Olympia was cancelled.
126. 2022 - Julie van Nieuwenhuyse. A Belgian competitor. European women's competition runs through national federations affiliated to the international amateur structure.
127. 2022-08-30 - Lenda Murray Ms Olympia (Full Version). A long compilation of Lenda Murray's competitive career across her eight Ms. Olympia titles.
128. 2022-09-16 - Oldest Living Female Bodybuilder Ernestine Shepherd. A long interview with Ernestine Shepherd, made by Wings of Strength.
129. 2022-10-25 - Exploited for decades, female bodybuilders speak out. The Washington Post reporting its investigation into sexual exploitation of female athletes in bodybuilding over two decades. These are the newspaper's findings as reported, and the archive presents them as such.
130. 2022-11-09 - Margita - The Road to Ms Olympia (documentary ENG version). Margita: The Road to Ms Olympia, a Czech documentary following Margita Zamolova's preparation for the Women's Physique Olympia and her move into the bodybuilding division.
131. 2023 - 2023 IFBB Pro League Ms. Olympia Champion Andrea Shaw Finals Routine 4K Video. Andrea Shaw's finals posing routine at the 2023 Ms. Olympia, filmed in 4K by NPC News Online.
132. 2023-08-01 - Lenda Murray: 8x Miss Olympia World Champion. Switching pom poms for dumbells. Eight time Ms. Olympia Lenda Murray on how she came to the sport after failing a Dallas Cowboys cheerleading tryout.
133. 2023-09-08 - Bodybuilding Legends Podcast #277 - Steve Weinberger, IFBB Head Judge. IFBB and NPC head judge Steve Weinberger interviewed on the Bodybuilding Legends Podcast, including his role in Pumping Iron II: The Women. A judge's own account of how the criteria were applied.
134. 2023-10-13 - Rachel McLish Interview: Empowering Women Through Fitness. A long interview with Rachel McLish on her career and her stated aim of giving womanhood an added dimension through strength. Useful for how the first Ms. Olympia framed her own project.
135. 2024 - 2024 IFBB Pro League 6x Ms. Olympia Andrea Shaw Prejudging & Finals Posing Routines 4K Video. Andrea Shaw's prejudging and finals routines at the 2024 Ms. Olympia, her sixth title year run in progress.
136. 2024-10-05 - Ms Olympia Andrea Shaw in the The Lenda Murray experience.. Ms. Olympia Andrea Shaw training with eight time Ms. Olympia Lenda Murray. Two champions from either side of the contest's cancellation in the same room.
137. 2025-01-06 - The History of Female Bodybuilding - Part 1: The Golden era in the1990s. The first part of a series on the history of female bodybuilding, covering the 1990s. That decade is when the IFBB's femininity rules of 1992 met the most muscular fields the sport had produced.
138. 2025 - Andrea Shaw 🇺🇸 1st @ 2025 Ms. Olympia (WBB). Andrea Shaw winning the 2025 Ms. Olympia, the 61st edition, taking her to six titles.
139. 2025 - Miss Olympia 2025 Finals | Best Moments, Posedown & Awards - Andrea Shaw did it Again!. Finals, posedown and awards at the 2025 Ms. Olympia.