most respected in the sport?

[PeterCas]

Are we talking most respected or most well liked?

If we are talking most respected...respected by who? The fans? Other athletes? I think you'll get a lot of differnt opinions (none of which are wrong).

I see guys that are closer to the industry throwing around different names than guys than those of us that are more or less just fans or national level competitors.

I don't think there's a right answer but still an interesting thread.

[Nancy]

Chiming in with my two cents here ... This is an extremely loaded question but the PROBLEM is what do most of the FORUM readers know about the "PEOPLE" in the sport?? I think the question is TOO broad ... I think it would be better to divide some categories rather than LUMP everyone together. Bodybuilder, Magazines/Writers. Promoters, etc
Furthermore - what do any of us really know about anyone other than what is put OUT there?
Personally- reading the the comment that DAVE is not trustworthy got me a bit boiled over bc who is anyone to judge him based on what you think you know ? Or judge anyone else?
To me, A person that has maintained themselves in this industry for almost 3 decades and:
1) Has people talking about them in a positive way is a good thing
2) Has competed and was MASSIVE and is still alive is a GOOD thing
3) Has fans is a good thing
4) loves animals and takes care of their father is a VERY VERY good thing
my point is -- back off of judgment about crap you know nothing about ...

[mountaindog1]

If I had to pick one person....hmm...Jim Lorimar. Jim is such a catalyst behind the scenes, and obviously built up the legacy of the Arnold Classic.

I remember on a few occasions when I worked at a Bank, I would be visiting branches and just so happened that I ran into him (he was coming in). when he walked in, literally every person in the branch would smile. He could light up a room.

Sometimes when I over at Metro gym on Columbus he comes in. I always make a point to shake his hand and thank him for being him. He is such a good man.

JM

[HTW]

image.jpg

[warthog]

If I had to pick one person....hmm...Jim Lorimar. Jim is such a catalyst behind the scenes, and obviously built up the legacy of the Arnold Classic.

I remember on a few occasions when I worked at a Bank, I would be visiting branches and just so happened that I ran into him (he was coming in). when he walked in, literally every person in the branch would smile. He could light up a room.

Sometimes when I over at Metro gym on Columbus he comes in. I always make a point to shake his hand and thank him for being him. He is such a good man.

JM

Bank staff always smile when their big money clients walk in .He has done really well with it ( The Arnold),to the point where it's looked at as being bigger than the O and you don't see or hear a bad word about him.

[Curt James]

And Lorimer has more than just the Arnold. If I'm not mistaken, he also has a biker gathering as well as a golf festival. Columbus must love Lorimer productions.

Purchased a t-shirt at an early Arnold. Jean Lorimer was behind the stand and I asked for an autograph. She laughed at my request and said something like, "Why not? I only run the whole thing."

Old news, but look at these numbers!

Monday, February 27, 2006

Arnold will be back in Columbus, and he'll keep coming back through 2015.

The Arnold Fitness Weekend announced today it signed a long-term commitment that will keep the sporting and fitness event in Columbus for nine more years, says Jim Lorimer, producer of the event.

It's estimated to generate $2.5 billion in future visitor spending, according to Experience Columbus. Last year, $27.5 million was spent in Columbus by visitors to the event.

The event began in 1989 as the Arnold Classic, a bodybuilding competition co-founded by Arnold Schwarzenegger that attracted 4,000 visitors. In 2005, it had 30 events with 15,000 athletes and 120,000 visitors.

From http://m.bizjournals.com/columbus/st...27/daily7.html

[Curt James]

Strength in Numbers

By Rowland Stiteler
July 2, 2013

Location, location, location has been the key to spectacular success for the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio.

Every now and then, the perfect synergy between an event and a destination takes place, in which the event succeeds beyond its planners’ wildest dreams thanks in no small part to the destination itself.

Such a case is the annual Arnold Sports Festival, held each March in Columbus, Ohio, for the past 25 years. Just how successful is the event? The numbers speak for themselves.

“Last year, the London Olympics had 10,000 athletes from around the world competing in 36 sports,” said Jim Lorimer, founder, CEO and chief planner of the Arnold Sports Festival. “This March in Columbus, we had 18,000 athletes from 81 countries competing in 46 sporting events. Without question, the strong support we have from the community of Columbus has been a key factor in the festival growing as much as it has over the 25 years since we started it here.”

In 1989, when Lorimer started the event, it involved about 30 athletes—all body builders—participating in a one-day competition in a venue that seated 4,000.

“That was it--quite a contrast with the event we have now, which lasts four days and uses six different venues around the city and attracted 175,000 people, who came to watch the competitive events this year,” said Brent Lalonde, marketing and communications director for the Arnold Sports Festival and a seven-year veteran in that post with Experience Columbus, the city’s CVB.

The 2013 Arnold Sports Festival, held Feb. 28-March 3 in Columbus, pumped US$42 million into the Columbus economy, including the consumption of 12,000 hotel room nights.

The 2013 Arnold Sports Festival, held Feb. 28-March 3 in Columbus, pumped US$42 million into the Columbus economy, including the consumption of 12,000 hotel room nights. It’s in the top echelon of crowd-drawing events in Columbus, which includes football games at Ohio State University.

Lorimer says community support is not the only component of the sports festival’s success, but it is certainly a vital one.

“It’s the entire community’s local mobilization that makes the event possible,” Lorimer said. “It’s the united effort of everyone, from civilians to taxi drivers, that creates an experience like none other, in a place where everyone is proud to be a part of it.”

And the success that began in Columbus is not the whole story of the upward path this once small event has taken. In 2011, Lorimer and his partners started the Arnold Classic Europe, held in Madrid each March. And in April 2013, the Arnold Classic Brazil, which will be an annual event going forward, was rolled out.

“We have globalized our concept, and have some other options going forward, so we are looking at getting established in a fourth or maybe even a fifth continent,” [marketing and communications director for the Arnold Sports Festival, Brent] Lalonde said.

“We have globalized our concept, and have some other options going forward, so we are looking at getting established in a fourth or maybe even a fifth continent,” Lalonde said.
Lorimer says continent No. 4 is Asia, with an Arnold Sports Festival starting up in Beijing in summer 2014.

The festival’s spread to new locations around the world has a lot to do with extensive worldwide media coverage, Lorimer says.

“We credentialed 600 media representatives from around the world last year,” he said. “And young athletes get coverage in their home countries, and that seems to have spurred interest in still more countries.”

The mercurial rise of the festival can also be partially attributed to a celebrity known worldwide.

“The ‘Arnold’ in the Arnold Festival is of course Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Lalonde said. “He and Jim (Lorimer) have known each other since 1975 and have been partners in the Arnold Sports Festival since day one, back in 1989.”

Lorimer and Schwarzenegger (the world’s most famous body builder), who met on the competitive bodybuilding circuit 42 years ago, share the goal of increasing the popularity that competitive sport and bringing it to a higher level of acceptance and legitimacy in the view of sports fans and the general public.

“At the time, we forged a partnership,” Lorimer said. “Arnold and I wanted to professionalize the sport of body building—that was our goal.”

That was a key focus of that very first event in 1989. Schwarzenegger, like Lorimer, was impressed with the Columbus community’s enthusiasm to share a vision and help achieve that goal. Both men were convinced that this was the destination where the festival should stay permanently.

In 1990, Schwarzenegger was appointed chair of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, and Lorimer was appointed as a council member. This gave the two men broadened access to the world sports community, and the interaction with that community also helped form their core strategy for their own sports festival. In a word, they diversified.

“We soon began to partner with the martial arts community, and a martial arts competition was added to the festival in Columbus,” Lorimer said. “And the number of sports we have been including in the competition has been growing year after year ever since. Because of the growth that the festival began to experience, more segments of the sports community started coming to us and asking to be included, and that process has continued throughout the history of the festival.”

Now the diversification of the sports represented has reached a point at which the body builders are the distinct minority of the athletes.

“Out of the 18,000 athletes we had competing, only about were 500 body builders,” Lorimer said.

Thirteen of the sports competition events are sports that are also in the Olympics—track and field, archery, gymnastics and more. The wide variety shows how eclectic the Arnold Sports Festival has become, with ballroom dancing, a folk dancing competition, events such as sledgehammer throwing that are part of a Highland Games segment. There’s even a cheerleading competition that involves 3,000 contestants.

One of the more popular events in the sports festival combines a strength challenge with a track competition—the Pump ‘n’ Run 5K, where competitors bench press their own body weight up to 30 times before beginning the run, and the number of reps they can do with the weights gets subtracted from a total aggregate that includes their 5K run time.

The biggest segment of competitors is made up of young people of high school and junior high school age and even younger, making up 16,000 of the 18,000 of the competitors in 2013. The remaining 2,000 competitors range from college athletes to the adult, professional-level competitors who are part of the worldwide competitive body building circuit.

“I think, without question, the involvement of these young people and their parents has spread the popularity of the games,” Lorimer said. “And it’s a good learning experience for young athletes. Skaters get to interact with the fencing competitors; dancers see what the track-and-field kids are doing; it’s a chance to, more or less, develop one’s athletic discipline and knowledge by seeing what others are doing.”

Still, another part of the formula that would be appealing to most any event planner is the hugely successful trade show component called the Arnold Sports Expo.

[...] we have maxed out the exhibit space in the Columbus Convention Center,” Lalonde said. “There is strong demand for those trade show booths.”

“It’s been constant for the past few years at 700 trade show booths because we have maxed out the exhibit space in the Columbus Convention Center,” Lalonde said. “There is strong demand for those trade show booths.”

Lorimer says the Columbus community has been involved at the grassroots level and helped handle a lot of the necessary groundwork for the Arnold Sports Festival on a volunteer basis.
“Experience Columbus trains visitor ambassadors for us,” Lorimer said. “They help with things like helping the 175,000 people who come to the festival navigate their way around the city.”
In all, about 1,000 volunteers support the festival each year, including 150 local medical professionals who come to support the needs of the athletes and the emergency aid stations that are needed with such a huge crowd of spectators.

“It is very heartening to see how people from the Columbus community have embraced the idea of what we are doing and showed a civic esprit de corps by pitching in to make this work,” Lorimer said. “I think that when representatives of cities around the world come to Columbus and see what happens here, it strengthens their desire to see the Arnold Sports Festival come to their own countries.”

From http://www.mpiweb.org/Magazine/MPINe...gth_in_Numbers

[hifrommike65]

I am always anxious to see the new Battle for the Olympia DVDs that http://www.mocvideo.com puts out each year. The new ones just got issued. Two notable things occurred this year. The first is the new 212 guy on the pro block: Aaron Clark. The 212 DVD set profiled Aaron twice, & devoted almost an hour to him. I was most impressed by his commitment, his philosophy (of bodybuilding & of life), & his potential.

The second involves the coverage of the Olympia WPD (women's physique division). On the Battle DVDs, we get significant excerpts of the pump room, the prejudge, & the finals & awards. I immediately e-mailed Bruce & thanked him for that, & he replied that next year he was expanding coverage of both WPD & MPD. So I'll also say Bruce Lester, who took over Mitsuro Okabe's company & kept it vital, is my second mention for most admired. & I am going by who I admire personally, not any other standard of admiration.

[mountaindog1]

Strength in Numbers

By Rowland Stiteler
July 2, 2013

Location, location, location has been the key to spectacular success for the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio.

Every now and then, the perfect synergy between an event and a destination takes place, in which the event succeeds beyond its planners’ wildest dreams thanks in no small part to the destination itself.

Such a case is the annual Arnold Sports Festival, held each March in Columbus, Ohio, for the past 25 years. Just how successful is the event? The numbers speak for themselves.

“Last year, the London Olympics had 10,000 athletes from around the world competing in 36 sports,” said Jim Lorimer, founder, CEO and chief planner of the Arnold Sports Festival. “This March in Columbus, we had 18,000 athletes from 81 countries competing in 46 sporting events. Without question, the strong support we have from the community of Columbus has been a key factor in the festival growing as much as it has over the 25 years since we started it here.”

In 1989, when Lorimer started the event, it involved about 30 athletes—all body builders—participating in a one-day competition in a venue that seated 4,000.

“That was it--quite a contrast with the event we have now, which lasts four days and uses six different venues around the city and attracted 175,000 people, who came to watch the competitive events this year,” said Brent Lalonde, marketing and communications director for the Arnold Sports Festival and a seven-year veteran in that post with Experience Columbus, the city’s CVB.

The 2013 Arnold Sports Festival, held Feb. 28-March 3 in Columbus, pumped US$42 million into the Columbus economy, including the consumption of 12,000 hotel room nights.

The 2013 Arnold Sports Festival, held Feb. 28-March 3 in Columbus, pumped US$42 million into the Columbus economy, including the consumption of 12,000 hotel room nights. It’s in the top echelon of crowd-drawing events in Columbus, which includes football games at Ohio State University.

Lorimer says community support is not the only component of the sports festival’s success, but it is certainly a vital one.

“It’s the entire community’s local mobilization that makes the event possible,” Lorimer said. “It’s the united effort of everyone, from civilians to taxi drivers, that creates an experience like none other, in a place where everyone is proud to be a part of it.”

And the success that began in Columbus is not the whole story of the upward path this once small event has taken. In 2011, Lorimer and his partners started the Arnold Classic Europe, held in Madrid each March. And in April 2013, the Arnold Classic Brazil, which will be an annual event going forward, was rolled out.

“We have globalized our concept, and have some other options going forward, so we are looking at getting established in a fourth or maybe even a fifth continent,” [marketing and communications director for the Arnold Sports Festival, Brent] Lalonde said.

“We have globalized our concept, and have some other options going forward, so we are looking at getting established in a fourth or maybe even a fifth continent,” Lalonde said.
Lorimer says continent No. 4 is Asia, with an Arnold Sports Festival starting up in Beijing in summer 2014.

The festival’s spread to new locations around the world has a lot to do with extensive worldwide media coverage, Lorimer says.

“We credentialed 600 media representatives from around the world last year,” he said. “And young athletes get coverage in their home countries, and that seems to have spurred interest in still more countries.”

The mercurial rise of the festival can also be partially attributed to a celebrity known worldwide.

“The ‘Arnold’ in the Arnold Festival is of course Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Lalonde said. “He and Jim (Lorimer) have known each other since 1975 and have been partners in the Arnold Sports Festival since day one, back in 1989.”

Lorimer and Schwarzenegger (the world’s most famous body builder), who met on the competitive bodybuilding circuit 42 years ago, share the goal of increasing the popularity that competitive sport and bringing it to a higher level of acceptance and legitimacy in the view of sports fans and the general public.

“At the time, we forged a partnership,” Lorimer said. “Arnold and I wanted to professionalize the sport of body building—that was our goal.”

That was a key focus of that very first event in 1989. Schwarzenegger, like Lorimer, was impressed with the Columbus community’s enthusiasm to share a vision and help achieve that goal. Both men were convinced that this was the destination where the festival should stay permanently.

In 1990, Schwarzenegger was appointed chair of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, and Lorimer was appointed as a council member. This gave the two men broadened access to the world sports community, and the interaction with that community also helped form their core strategy for their own sports festival. In a word, they diversified.

“We soon began to partner with the martial arts community, and a martial arts competition was added to the festival in Columbus,” Lorimer said. “And the number of sports we have been including in the competition has been growing year after year ever since. Because of the growth that the festival began to experience, more segments of the sports community started coming to us and asking to be included, and that process has continued throughout the history of the festival.”

Now the diversification of the sports represented has reached a point at which the body builders are the distinct minority of the athletes.

“Out of the 18,000 athletes we had competing, only about were 500 body builders,” Lorimer said.

Thirteen of the sports competition events are sports that are also in the Olympics—track and field, archery, gymnastics and more. The wide variety shows how eclectic the Arnold Sports Festival has become, with ballroom dancing, a folk dancing competition, events such as sledgehammer throwing that are part of a Highland Games segment. There’s even a cheerleading competition that involves 3,000 contestants.

One of the more popular events in the sports festival combines a strength challenge with a track competition—the Pump ‘n’ Run 5K, where competitors bench press their own body weight up to 30 times before beginning the run, and the number of reps they can do with the weights gets subtracted from a total aggregate that includes their 5K run time.

The biggest segment of competitors is made up of young people of high school and junior high school age and even younger, making up 16,000 of the 18,000 of the competitors in 2013. The remaining 2,000 competitors range from college athletes to the adult, professional-level competitors who are part of the worldwide competitive body building circuit.

“I think, without question, the involvement of these young people and their parents has spread the popularity of the games,” Lorimer said. “And it’s a good learning experience for young athletes. Skaters get to interact with the fencing competitors; dancers see what the track-and-field kids are doing; it’s a chance to, more or less, develop one’s athletic discipline and knowledge by seeing what others are doing.”

Still, another part of the formula that would be appealing to most any event planner is the hugely successful trade show component called the Arnold Sports Expo.

[...] we have maxed out the exhibit space in the Columbus Convention Center,” Lalonde said. “There is strong demand for those trade show booths.”

“It’s been constant for the past few years at 700 trade show booths because we have maxed out the exhibit space in the Columbus Convention Center,” Lalonde said. “There is strong demand for those trade show booths.”

Lorimer says the Columbus community has been involved at the grassroots level and helped handle a lot of the necessary groundwork for the Arnold Sports Festival on a volunteer basis.
“Experience Columbus trains visitor ambassadors for us,” Lorimer said. “They help with things like helping the 175,000 people who come to the festival navigate their way around the city.”
In all, about 1,000 volunteers support the festival each year, including 150 local medical professionals who come to support the needs of the athletes and the emergency aid stations that are needed with such a huge crowd of spectators.

“It is very heartening to see how people from the Columbus community have embraced the idea of what we are doing and showed a civic esprit de corps by pitching in to make this work,” Lorimer said. “I think that when representatives of cities around the world come to Columbus and see what happens here, it strengthens their desire to see the Arnold Sports Festival come to their own countries.”

From http://www.mpiweb.org/Magazine/MPINe...gth_in_Numbers

Great find Curt. It is amazing how much money gets pumped into the economy that weekend. Jim is the man.

[Ibarramedia]

I am always anxious to see the new Battle for the Olympia DVDs that http://www.mocvideo.com puts out each year. The new ones just got issued. Two notable things occurred this year. The first is the new 212 guy on the pro block: Aaron Clark. The 212 DVD set profiled Aaron twice, & devoted almost an hour to him. I was most impressed by his commitment, his philosophy (of bodybuilding & of life), & his potential.

The second involves the coverage of the Olympia WPD (women's physique division). On the Battle DVDs, we get significant excerpts of the pump room, the prejudge, & the finals & awards. I immediately e-mailed Bruce & thanked him for that, & he replied that next year he was expanding coverage of both WPD & MPD. So I'll also say Bruce Lester, who took over Mitsuro Okabe's company & kept it vital, is my second mention for most admired. & I am going by who I admire personally, not any other standard of admiration.

Is this similar to the IFBB version of dvd/blu-rays? GMV from Australia also has full coverage of the Olympias.

[Steve Wennerstrom]

And Lorimer has more than just the Arnold. If I'm not mistaken, he also has a biker gathering as well as a golf festival. Columbus must love Lorimer productions.

Purchased a t-shirt at an early Arnold. Jean Lorimer was behind the stand and I asked for an autograph. She laughed at my request and said something like, "Why not? I only run the whole thing."

Old news, but look at these numbers!

Monday, February 27, 2006

Arnold will be back in Columbus, and he'll keep coming back through 2015.

The Arnold Fitness Weekend announced today it signed a long-term commitment that will keep the sporting and fitness event in Columbus for nine more years, says Jim Lorimer, producer of the event.

It's estimated to generate $2.5 billion in future visitor spending, according to Experience Columbus. Last year, $27.5 million was spent in Columbus by visitors to the event.

The event began in 1989 as the Arnold Classic, a bodybuilding competition co-founded by Arnold Schwarzenegger that attracted 4,000 visitors. In 2005, it had 30 events with 15,000 athletes and 120,000 visitors.

From http://m.bizjournals.com/columbus/st...27/daily7.html

Also, I can remember back when the Arnold Classic was called the IFBB Pro Worlds - promoted by Lorimer and Arnold. In fact, in 1986 they added a Ms. International in women's bodybuilding and a young Australian girl named Erika Geisen won. That was in 1986.

And going way back, Jim Lorimer was the meet director for the National Women's Track & Field Championships in in Columbus. That was in 1965 or '66.

[Ibarramedia]

Also, I can remember back when the Arnold Classic was called the IFBB Pro Worlds - promoted by Lorimer and Arnold. In fact, in 1986 they added a Ms. International in women's bodybuilding and a young Australian girl named Erika Geisen won. That was in 1986.

And going way back, Jim Lorimer was the meet director for the National Women's Track & Field Championships in in Columbus. That was in 1965 or '66.

I did not realize the Arnold classic was the same as the pro worlds. I always thought Arnold just came out with a competition and called it the Arnold classic. Good info.