Big Ramy Before His 2020 Olympia Win – the Early Years
As Muscular Development celebrates Big Ramy’s 2020 Mr. Olympia win, we look back at the events that helped shape his path to victory, with highlights from the MD archives. Today, Have We Seen the Future … and Is It Called Big Ramy?originally published in July 2014.
Have We Seen the Future … and Is It Called Big Ramy?
By Peter McGough
By the time this issue nestles into your gnarled deadlift-stressed hands, the 2014 New York Pro, staged on May 17 at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in lower Manhattan by ace promoters Bev Francis and Steve Weinberger, will be a matter of public record.
At last year’s rendition, we witnessed the most explosive pro debut in years as 286-pound Mamdouh Elssbiay, known as Big Ramy, made more jaws drop than an incompetent dentist as he walked out and just stunned the assembled muscle masses with his sheer size and development: he was like a giant sandwich board with a wicked V-taper. New York had seen nothing like it since King Kong decided that ascending up the Empire State Building was more fun than necking a few with Babe Ruth at The Cotton Club.
Big Ramy just crushed the opposition (including marquee competitor Victor Martinez), and in his first foray into the pose-for-pay ranks nailed down a straight firsts victory. His emergence was the catalyst for more hype than an Elvis Presley comeback tour, with many predicting he was a future Mr. Olympia, and some stating he would win it first time out in his Big O debut last September. In the end, probably not as sharp as New York, he was adjudged eighth at the 2013 Olympia, although personally this humble scribe saw him a couple of places higher than that.
Probably even more remarkable than his explosion onto the bodybuilding landscape is the fact that he only started seriously training as bodybuilder back in 2011 when he weighed around 200 pounds. Now he’s the hottest thing in bodybuilding since the sun beds in Gold’s, Venice, malfunctioned.
This year Big Ramy aims to improve on his Olympia placing of last year so 2014 will be a year of proving that his 2013 exploits were not a flash in the pan.
BIG RAMY: GATEWAY TO THE FUTURE
It’s always been a thought of mine that as weight training expands its reach ever further, the potential for more genetic freaks to surface grows ever more likely. Even within our bodybuilding environs, the numbers training and competing have mushroomed, thanks to the introduction of Men’s and Women’s Physique Divisions, Bikini, Classic Physique in Europe, etc. The reality is that more people are picking up weights than ever before.
When I first entered a gym in the late ‘60s, the only people who lifted weights were Olympic lifers, powerlifters, bodybuilders and some track and field athletes like shot-putters and hammer throwers. Athletes in other sports were not only dissuaded to stay away from weights, they were ordered to as they would become “musclebound” and their performance would suffer. Then in the early ‘80s the fitness boom took off, and has continued to gain momentum to the point where every sportsperson trains with weights, schools have state-of-the-art strength facilities, any hotel worth its chocolate-on-the-pillow credentials has a gym, and from ages 16 to 90 the mantra is, “No pain, no gain, buddy!” My point is that with the continuing mass infusion of numbers lifting weights, the genetic pool is growing exponentially, triggering more chance of DNA freaks like Big Ramy getting into squatting, curling and rowing mode.
These days, just about everyone is muscle crazy, from Hollywood to pop music and through all segments of sports; a state of affairs that prompts just about everyone to pick up a bar with serious intentions. Let’s take the case of current Mr. Olympia, Phil Heath. To help his basketball endeavors he was encouraged to lift weights, discovered he had an aptitude for building quality muscle and has so far – at last count – racked up a haul of three Sandows. If he’d have been born 20 years earlier, no way would he have been advised to pump iron and a genetic marvel would have likely bypassed our sport. Current research shows that the number of people exercising regularly has risen four-fold from the 1980s and gym memberships have followed a similar trend.
Against that scenario, the looming appearance of other Big Ramy-like freaks grows – like our subject’s physique – ever larger. The question is: Have we seen the future and is it called Big Ramy?
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