Louisville Magazine

AUG 2017

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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66 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 stered the reputation of the International Federation of BodyBuilding and Fitness. Previously, bodybuilding had been a frac- tious sport, with half a dozen organizations fighting for dominance. "ey would sue each other," Jones says. "ey couldn't get anything done." Post-Arnold, IFBB was at the top of the bodybuilding heap. Grad- ually, it began to make changes, creating opportunities for women competitors, and then gradually expanding categories for men. Even as the sport expanded, the popu- larity of traditional bodybuilding began to contract, fueled, at least in part, by the growing awareness of steroid use, Jones says. It's not that steroids have gone away. Louisville coach and former competitor Steve Weingarten says many competitors continue to use them, but generally at lower doses than in the 1970s. He guessed at a figure: "Say a third to half are using steroids; if you made that assumption, you'd be in pretty safe territory, although it's probably less in the bikini category." Steroids could create the kind of muscle striation and vascularity that aren't favored in bikini. (e competitors in this story say they don't use steroids.) Jones says promoters like him have little hope of controlling steroid use. Testing, with its risk of false positives, would make him vulnerable to lawsuits, he says. Besides, today's competition drugs are far more extensive than anabolic steroids, everything from hormone-replacement therapy in older women to various an- ti-aging compounds. Even drawing a line becomes difficult. Competition categories that demand less muscle bulk, as two new- er men's categories do, may be less likely to encourage steroid use. In the old days, guys like 36-year-old Myrom Kingery, of Jeffersontown, and his fellow competitors in men's physique would have had no place onstage. Neither would the men in the classic physique category, who are more muscular than the physique group but are not allowed to exceed certain weight limitations for their height. Bodybuilders don't have weight limits. is is Kingery's first competition, but he's mellow, probably because he spends his days performing for an audience. It started a few years ago when he filled in for a friend and spent a day curling cinderblocks as an extra on the local set of a movie called Hindsight 20/20. Kingery, who worked in warehousing and logistics, turned this scant opportunity into a new career. "I love to talk," he says. "I talked to the director and the writer for a while that day, and they brought me back a second day." ree months later, they called him again for one of the many remakes of Hell Night. "After that, I was hooked. It was like caffeine. I had to have it." He has steadily leveraged a series of small nonspeaking parts into a career that includes movies you have heard of, such as Allegiant, part of the Divergent series. "I had a scene where I killed one of the main characters. We worked on it for a week, and it didn't even get into the film," he says. e critics savaged the movie and audiences ignored it, but Kingery didn't mind. "I just had a great time. I learned a lot on that film. It was my first major motion picture. I loved it." He played a Russian soldier in e Fate of the Furious, the eighth film in the Fast & Furious franchise. His distinctive look — he's a muscular 6'2", bald, with a long, bushy beard — has brought steady work as a fearsome bad guy. But among the competitors at the Derby Championship, he says, he's nothing special. "ese guys are — they're so up there," he says, indicating a space over his head. "I'm starting out. I'm new. I know where my place is. ey're up here; I'm down here. And I'm perfectly fine with that.… eir bodies are magnificent. I'm nowhere near that level." For today, Kingery's beard is ringed with rubber bands, making a skin- ny front-facing ponytail. As the morning rolls along, thirst and hunger are his only complaints. Like many competitors, he's limiting liquid intake to enhance muscle definition. "Last night at 9 was my last wa- ter," Kingery says. at was 15 hours ago. While the last of the male body- builders flex for the competition's 10 official judges, bikini competitors begin to queue backstage. e bronzed group lines up shortest to tallest, the line snaking across the room. Napier, at 5'1", will take As his unhappy marriage began to collapse, Kingery weighed more than 300 pounds.

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