MUSCLE: A Writer’s Trip Through a Sport with No Boundaries
By Jon Hotten
Yellow Jersey Press; £10.99; 288pp
ISBN 0 224 06966 7
Buy the book

The news from the frontline of professional bodybuilding is that the movie Pumping Iron, once the essential summary of the muscle-flexing game, now stands in the same quaint and dated relation to its sport as big shorts and laced-up balls do to professional football. We have entered, in bodybuilding, what historians are already referring to as “the Era of the Freak”.

When today’s ripped occupants of the posing pouch grind themselves into the required competition shapes — front double biceps, lat spread, side chest, rear double biceps, side triceps, abdominals and thighs — they make the musclemen of yesteryear look like they weren’t really squeezing. The championship poundages mount: 230lb, 280, 320, and ever onwards. Arnold Schwarzenegger became Mr Olympia in 1975 at 6ft 1in (185cm) and 240lb (109kg). The 2003 winner was 3in shorter and 50lb heavier.

Something, then, has been getting into bodybuilders, and we can take it from Jon Hotten that it’s not the food. Hotten, who has previously reported from the fat-lipped world of unlicensed boxing, has now burrowed backstage on the professional bodybuilding circuit and returns with Muscle, a sinewy piece of reportage which, when it isn’t alarming, is merely amazing.

The extra bulk? Drugs, of course. A sport practised exclusively in the tiniest trunks known to humankind does not lend itself well to secrets, and this is the game’s worst-kept one. “People were always asking what sport would be like if everyone was allowed to take whatever they wanted to achieve their ends,” Hotten writes. “Well, bodybuilding was what it was like.”

Who peoples this tiny, pumped-up, permanently aching world? “Meatheads, narcissists, egoists, attention-seekers, over-compensators and the terminally aggrieved,” writes Hotten, unsparingly, of a community that he comes to admire and be excited and enthralled by, though never to the loss of his book’s glinting, unsentimental edge. “It was a sport that demanded extremity, so it attracted extremists.”

Bar the occasional steroidal rage, or showbiz strop, the extremity is directed inwards. Bodybuilding’s triumphs are solo triumphs, and its tragedies are those of implosion, internal meltdown, the silent failure of organs. (See Hotten’s dizzying opening chapter on the death by bleeding of Andreas Munzer, the German bodybuilder.) This is an inward-looking world and a fiercely defensive one. As Schwarzenegger, still the sport’s talisman, said in his pumping days: “ F*** ’em. They’re never going to accept us, so let’s tailor this sport for our community, not their community.”

In that defensiveness lies a tacit admission that the body beautiful is shadowed by the body grotesque. Bodybuilders know that the reaction to them among the unknowing is most likely finger-pointing and the kind of awe which meets hilarity coming round the other side. When Ronnie Coleman, the multiple Mr Olympia, stepped on the stage in 2003 looking “biblically big”, Hotten concedes that “the reaction of most people was simply to laugh at him. It was an involuntary thing. I realised that I was laughing at Coleman as well.”

That’s not Hotten’s typical response, though, in a book which is balanced, respectful, non-judgmental and rendered in an admirably muscular, entirely fat-free prose. Clive James’s “condom stuffed with walnuts” will continue to serve as the definitive comic reduction of the bodybuilder’s art, but I also respect, in another way, Hotten’s “chest by Jackson Pollock, spattered with fat chunks of vein” and his description of Flex Wheeler: “Flex was drawn with orbs and ellipses. The lines of his body flowed like water. At the elbows and wrists, at the waist and knees and ankles, Flex was a regular joe. But from these bone junctions, he curved outwards like a bow.”

This, though, is a book of many intimate surprises, For instance, bodybuilders fly economy. Most of them aren’t rich enough to fly anything else. But also something in them responds to the discomfort. It’s another chance to try to master the body you have built.

That said, Britain’s Ernie Taylor has been known to request an aisle seat and then leave large parts of himself in the passageway, preventing stewards from passing. At which point he will be summoned to the front of the plane and inserted in business, or better. Try it for yourself next time. If you have the muscle.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy