Elaine Chung Forty-four years ago, bodybuilding wasn’t much more than just a marginal underground subculture—an obscure freak-show circuit populated by jacked-up guys in Speedos and slathered in baby oil showing off their impossible physiques in front of half-filled VFW halls. There wasn’t any real glory in the sport. No big paydays or purses. It was just another fringey demimonde desperate for something (or someone) to help it crossover into the mainstream. In 1977, it finally found that something in an American documentary called Pumping Iron…and it found that someone in a cocky, charismatic Austrian on the cusp of becoming a global superstar named Arnold Schwarzenegger.