Oscar Heidenstam, The Mr Universe Contest, and the Amateur Ideal in British Bodybuilding

During Britain's so-called ‘golden age of bodybuilding’ during the 1950s and 1960s, Oscar Heidenstam, through his National Amateur Bodybuilders Association (NABBA) and Health and Strength magazine, elevated the annual Mr Universe Contest in London into the world's most prestigious physique competition. What made this achievement so remarkable was Heidenstam's commitment to the Victorian ideal of the gentleman amateur. Eventually, however, this outmoded approach prevented him from staying abreast with the times and resisting countervailing societal forces that were commercial, American and modern. Tradition and parochialism prevailed as NABBA, the Mr Universe Contest, and British bodybuilding went into ‘relative decline’ in the 1970s. And California, home of the rival Weider organization and Arnold Schwarzenegger, displaced London as center of the bodybuilders’ universe.