KenTMaroon’s BodyBlog

I’m in Jeju City, South   Korea (Thurs Oct 25 through Mon Oct 29) for the IFBB Mens’ Amateur World Championships.  It’s now 4pm on Friday,  South Korea time, which is midnight Thursday L.A. time, and 3 am Friday east coast time…Confused?  So are most of us!

I am with the five competitors on the U.S. team as U.S. Delegate, and also as our judge for the competition.  We’ll have a solid count in a few more hours after weigh-ins, but preliminary we have 53 nations represented here, with 171 competitors in 9 classes of men’s bodybuilding.  All of our team won their weight classes at the Team Universe in Manhattan in mid-July.  Both the Team Universe and these World Championships are drug-tested through urine testing, run according to IOC standards.

For me it was a mere 13 hours from L.A. to Seoul, then change of airport and a short 1 hour flight and arrived in Jeju after a total of 17 hours. For some of our competitors coming from Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Michigan, it was close to 24 hours total travel. For our one competitor from San   Diego, who was evacuated from his house due to the fires for two days prior to departure, and only allowed back in about 12 hours before he had to be at LAX, it was a far longer journey than time can measure.

We got here Thursday morning about 10 am (again, Korean time, having completely skipped Wednesday!) and negotiated registration for the competition, checkin to the hotel, obtaining photo IDs, and obtaining coupons for the meals that are provided. The competitors slept. I preferred to keep myself awake until normal local sleep time ’cause I seem to convert to local time faster that way.

Judges’ meeting was earlier this afternoon, and weigh-ins are in about an hour. Got some amazing competitors here. As an upper end benchmark, this is the competition at which Dennis Wolf won his IFBB Pro card in 2005 in Shanghai, and less than two years later is top 5 at the Olympia. I had the pleasure of being on the panel for his class, and for the overall. His potential was obvious, but unknown to those in the U.S. as this competition gets zero notice at home.

Our competitors are Paul Coats in the Bantams from Michigan, Kelly Pettiford in the lightweights (who also competed at the 2005 in Shanghai),  Chris Faildo in the welters (also competed in `1993 and 1994), Kiyoshi Moody in the lightheavies, and Shiloe Steinmetz in the superheavies.

I’ll post some more and provide some photos….