Dexter Jackson Wins Mr Olympia Europe

On October 22, Dexter “The Blade” Jackson won the IFBB 2016 Mr. Olympia Europe in Dortmund, Germany. This is of course a popular victory. Many feel Dexter’s aesthetics and symmetry are reminiscent of a more classic time. It’s also a decided boost to his already very successful career. But it’s also a de-cisive step forward for the sport of bodybuilding itself. There has often been discus-sion about how to attract a more “mainstream” audience for com-petitive bodybuilding. But that has never happened and isn’t likely to. Bodybuilding is a niche sport like BMX racing, windsurfing, or caber tossing. Fans of these sports know who the champions are and are passionate about the compe-titions, but unless you’re one of those people, you probably don’t know and don’t care.

Bodybuilding is never going to have a big audience like soccer, baseball, tennis, golf, or soccer in terms of the number of people who buy tickets to contests.What bodybuilding really needs is to build and strengthen its own core audience—reach out to people who do buy tickets to contests or can be induced to do so. And one way to do that is to accommodate fans who can’t get to the biggest competitions by bringing the competitions to them. The Mr. Olympia in Las Vegas is a tremendous spectacle and a great experience. But attending this event involves a lot of time, effort, and money, especially for fans who don’t live in North America. But now all of Europe can attend a version of the Mr. Olympia right in their own backyard. This makes the highest levels of pro bodybuilding accessible to more than 700 million additional people. This creates the potential for a huge ex-pansion in the sport’s fan base.

Of course, Arnold Schwar-zenegger and Jim Lorimer have already started down this road, with versions of the Arnold Clas-sic now in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. This too expands the potential audience by hundreds of millions. Both Arnold and the Mr. Olympia title have huge potential for promotion and publicity that could expand the number of hardcore supporters in-terested in attending bodybuilding competitions.But there’s also the matter of the titles themselves. Joe Weider invented the Mr. Olympia con-test in 1965 because he wanted a championship title recognized as the highest possible achievement in bodybuilding. Joe was always highly aware that working with bodybuilders with prestigious titles was great for business. Famous champions sell a lot more magazines, equipment, supplements—and tickets to contests.

The sport certainly doesn’t need to have the prestige of top titles watered down. But this isn’t what’s happening. The new Mr. Olympia Europe and the various iterations of the Arnold Classic are attracting the highest level of competitor, and the champions who earn these titles are totally worthy of recognition. So the au-diences who buy tickets to these worldwide events are certainly going to see exciting com-petitions and witness the making of historically important champions. So congrats to Dexter Jackson, IFBB Mr. Olympia Europe 2016. And congratulations as well to the IFBB for another major step in reaching out to potential bodybuilding fans in all parts of the world. 

Check out images from the 2016 IFBB Mr. Olympia Europe FINALS here

Check out images from the 2016 IFBB Mr. Olympia Europe Pre-Judging here

More images from the Men's Bodybuilding AND women's fitness categories here