20 Year Old Bodybuilder Dies At The Arnold Classic, But Will Bodybuilding Change?

It’s happened again! A 20 year old bb named Jodi Vance has died at the Arnold Classic and this news is making it around the internet yet I find it disappointing  that Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t said anything, we all remember how vocal he was years about the bubble gut issues in bb, so why is he not addressing bb who are dying younger by the year? Quite disappointing. So I would like to express my condolences to the family of friends of Jodi Vance.

Greg Doucette however has made a video that is not going viral, and it’s a great thing that he has done. We need more big voices like Greg’s and important people like Arnold and others in the sport addressing this very real and threatening issue as it keeps cropping up every year. I recently wrote a preprint paper that is currently online, and available to read, link is given below, and shows that bb have been dying earlier, living shorter lifespans since the introduction of PEDs in BB. I posted this video a couple of weeks ago, got some good views, and my instagram post on this topic went viral with almost 400K views and 4000 comments.

Not only that, my friend and cardiologist, Marco Vechiatto of Italy also released a study last year titled: Mortality risk in bb: a call for action to promote safe sport participation which literally calls for action to be taken to regulate these dangerous practices in the sport of BB. I recently spoke to Marco and we actually discussed his findings that show that more than any other sport, BB show the highest rate of sudden death, mostly due to cardiac disease and kidney failure.

As Greg points out in his recent video, illegal PED use has reached a point were it is glorified and celebrated online, with young influencers encouraging unsupervised use of PEDs from the black market, and portraying unrealistic physiques that can only be acquired through drug abuse and this information is being fed to the minds of many young athletes which is extremely dangerous to their health. I mean looking at Jodi Vance’s case, he didn’t even know that she was taking PEDs, and this is her coach we are talking about! If bb are subjecting themselves to these practices in an unsupervised manner, we are only going to keep seeing young athletes die younger by the year. Make no mistake of it, this is just another form of drug abuse. Now I don’t necessarily want to sound like Mr Mackey from South Park! "Drugs Are Bad"!!

But the point is, we are seeing more and more the detrimental effects of unsupervised drug abuse and it is important not only to talk about this issue, but to address it.

In a recent seminar, RR states how back in the GE at least, PEDs were of pharmaceutical grade, and at least some BB took them under doctors supervision. And I have to agree with Robby, things are now out of control.

But there is no point just talking about this issue. What solutions are possible to integrate now? Well, drug testing for starters, and two, to really discuss this issue openly. It’s impossible to stop drug use, the genie is out of the bottle, but I agree with Greg in that there should be new categories, with lower weight class, and completely natural, but then again, many will say there are already drug tested natural shows. Well perhaps the non natural shows should start drug testing too.

Another point of view could be and should be to discuss regulation of drug use, whether it should be integrated into the sport so that it can be supervised, or to ban it completely from the sports. The point is this conversation needs to be had. This point needs to be addressed full stop. People keep ignoring the elephant in the room, and people keep ignoring that particular conversation, and As long as we keep ignoring the elephant tin the room, more athletes will die, and die younger.

The only thing that influencers like myself and Greg can do is to continue to bring this conversation into the mainstream, my personal efforts are to continue studying this particular topic, I am in the process of writing several publications looking into this research topic and specifically, at the causes of death in bb, because if this is brought forward to the medical community, then this can be translated to the general public as a major cause of concern. If enough noise is made, then this could lead regulatory bodies and organizers of the sport to say enough is enough, and demand drug regulation in bb. That is a possibility, and I hope that is where my efforts can lead to. That’s it.