IT’S RARE THAT I have an opportunity to go back to the subject of a story and find out what happened afterward. It had been almost a decade since Bev changed my ideas about what a woman’s body could look like, but I found her again. She and Steve Weinberger, now her husband, were running a successful weight-training gym on Long Island.

The low building behind a row of tacky shops was hard to find, and seemed a sad contrast to the settings in which I’d first seen her. Once past its unpromising exterior, however, I was again in an island of calm and professionalism of the sort that I remembered Bev carrying around with her like an aura. I waited while she and Steve finished a businesslike discussion in their unbusinesslike sweat suits, noting again the absorption with which they listened to each other. The sign over the door said BEV FRANCIS GOLD’S GYM—Gold’s being the chain from which they’d bought the franchise—and Steve seemed as proud of that as he had been of Bev’s career when we first met. They were still a self-contained team.

Steve greeted me as if I were someone who had shared past glories and tribulations, and perhaps had passed a test. This time, he didn’t stay with us protectively but left Bev to show me around their domain. “There aren’t any glamorous leotards or aerobics here,” she explained as she walked me through a large area filled with rows of weight-training machines, “just serious people who want to get in shape.” Turning the corner, we came to a still bigger area, added on in a T-shape. It doubled the original space, and Bev said the addition had been necessary to handle the increase in clientele after they took over. Even on this weekday afternoon, before the after-work hours when most people arrive, there were a dozen sweat-suited exercisers at the machines, including several women. Bev noted that as one of the rare weight-training gyms to bear a woman’s name, it made women clients feel welcome.

She and Steve had continued to compete, she explained, and to travel as experts in the international subculture of powerlifting and bodybuilding, but the gym was as much their home as was their house nearby. Most of their time was spent in this space, which had all the glamour of an airplane hangar. In the evenings, they became personal trainers to private clients ranging from neophytes to competitors. It was obviously a source of pride to Bev, who stopped to pick up a scrap of paper from the spotless floor, then to offer me a protein drink from a display case. She evoked images that went beyond gender, managing to seem like a hostess in her own home and a boss showing off his factory.

We settled into a barren office decorated only with posters of Bev in an even more massive stage than I remembered. “Those are from a bodybuilding contest in ’91—probably my last,” she said, following my gaze. “I’m not officially retired, but the fire is gone.” Knowing that I was a stranger to this world, she began with her usual patience to fill me in on the novel-like saga of the past few years.

After the Las Vegas contest, a onetime event staged mostly for purposes of making the documentary, she’d gone back to the objective competition of powerlifting and won two more world championships, making a total of six in as many years. Counting her achievements in other sports, that meant she had broken over forty world records. The good news was that she was widely recognized as the strongest woman in the world. The bad news was that there were no other heights to climb. Unless the Olympics Committee added powerlifting to the list of Olympic events—something she doubted would happen, since so many other sports were standing in line—she could only see more of the same ahead. Like Michael Jordan, who had just confounded his fans by retiring from basketball because he had achieved what he set out to do, she felt there were no more challenges. She had decided to retire after the world powerlifting championship in 1985. “I was never defeated in any powerlifting competition,” she explained, “so it lost its spark.”

What she hadn’t conquered, however, was the bodybuilding world. To her own surprise, she’d become fascinated with this sport. Partly, she’d learned just how tough and demanding body sculpting and “one more rep” could be, the ingenuity and tenacity necessary to develop each muscle in her body to the fullest. Mostly, she was tempted by the challenge laid down by Las Vegas—that she could never win because she didn’t have the right “look.” In 1986, she returned to bodybuilding, which was becoming more of a sport in the United States, where she now lived because of her marriage to Steve. By 1987, she had come in first in the Women’s World Bodybuilding Championship in Canada. She could have walked away as one of the rare athletes who has won world records in more than one sport, but she knew the Mr. and Ms. Olympia contests were actually more important in the context of bodybuilding. Like the so-called world contests, one of which she had just won, they also attracted entrants from Germany, Holland, France, England, and other countries where bodybuilding was a popular sport. She decided she would focus on the yearly Olympia contest—until she won that too.

“Cory Everson was winning the Olympias by the time I got into them,” Bev explained. “She was very statuesque, very muscular, very tall—about five feet eight. She had an elegance about her body because of her tallness, her long legs.” In fact, Cory was probably able to be more muscular and still win because of what Bev had done to push the frontier. Since the judges seemed to be changing their standards, Bev decided that if she was “just a little more malleable, instead of my usual ‘This is me, take it or leave it,’ ” she might win too. After all, she was still ahead in strength. Why not change her style just enough to complete and benefit from the revolution she had started?

“I was much stockier and shorter than Cory,” Bev explained, “but I tried to portray as much femininity as I could in my own context.” That included having her nose made slightly smaller through plastic surgery. “I didn’t have a terrible nose,” she said with a smile, “but I’d always felt it was too big for my face. It was also more masculine, and my muscles were enough that was masculine about me. Besides, here I was in the capital of plastic surgery, so Steve said, ‘If you don’t like it, change it.’ I think it fits my face better now, and it’s made me feel more confident. I also let my hair grow longer, put highlights in it, and wore a little makeup. That made me feel good, because all of a sudden I could do something I didn’t know I could do. I thought you were born one way, and that was it. I didn’t know you could look more like these gorgeous women; that they had little tricks to make themselves look better.”

One little trick she wouldn’t try was breast implants. “All the top women bodybuilders have implants now. I’m one of the last who doesn’t—and who’s refused to. That’s one of the things that annoys me about bodybuilding. We’re not supposed to be what conventional women look like, because we’ve built our bodies. How can you have low body fat and still have big breasts? My sexuality isn’t threatened enough for me to stuff things in my chest to look like a woman.”

There were such layers of irony here that we paused to discuss them. In Pumping Iron II, the judges had checked women’s bras for padding and disqualified contestants accordingly. Now they were allowing implants, which were dangerous. It was an anomaly shared with many beauty contests. On the other hand, men weren’t questioned about padding their jockstraps, a gender enhancement that was rumored to be rampant. “Masculinity isn’t in question,” Bev explained. “There are male bodybuilders who are open about being gay—which doesn’t matter, as it shouldn’t. But why do women come under such suspicion? I was too naive to realize it when I first started this sport, but people assumed I was a lesbian, especially because I had a friend who was a woman bodybuilder and we used to room together and hang out together when we were traveling. She was married, but in retrospect, I realize that didn’t matter. We were two strong women together.

“If they think I’m a lesbian, or somebody else is a lesbian, I don’t care a scrap. But I’m so tired of being categorized that I even object when Steve sees two women in the gym and says they’re a couple—how does he know? How does anybody know? It drives me crazy to be predicted, so I try not to predict anybody else.”

This continuum of sexism reaches an extreme in a much more invasive end: the testing of women to see if their chromosomes are normal. “In track and field, only women’s chromosomes are checked,” Bev explained. “Women have been kicked out because they may have XXY when you’re only supposed to have XX, though genetically they look and act like women. A Bulgarian woman was forced to retire because she had XXY—so she went home and had a baby. Who decides what a woman is?”

There is also the less-well-known double standard of testing for steroids and other strength-enhancing drugs. “Because they think women can’t get hard and muscular without drugs—which is wrong, some women can—” Bev said, “they started by testing all the contestants at every Olympia. Then they substituted random testing, which means you can be tested at any time during the year, without warning. But it’s only for the women. The men, they don’t test. They did it one year, and everyone looked so crappy they stopped it.” This is one more way our own notions about male/female strength differences are being exaggerated by culture. The result is bad for women, because ideas about our lesser strength are confirmed, and bad for men, because it encourages them to use drugs that damage their bodies.

In spite of Bev’s efforts to be a little more “malleable” in the way she looked, she had risen from tenth place in 1987 to only third place in each of the following three years. As a natural champion, she couldn’t be satisfied with coming in third. She decided not just to outperform her competition but to second-guess the judges. In 1989, the year of Cory Everson’s sixth and last win before retiring, there was a startling contrast between Cory, who Bev felt was at her least impressive, and Bev, whose combination of muscle, hardness, and body symmetry seemed to be the best in the contest. Getting the message, Bev decided to try another tactic for the first competition after Cory Everson’s retirement. “It was a fresh slate, so I came in trying to portray as much ‘Coryness’ as I could, within my own framework. I pulled off not just fat but muscle. It’s not natural for my body to sit at 135 or 140 pounds; that’s just not me. I sit more comfortably at 160 or 165. I looked great at the lower weight I achieved for the contest, but I didn’t feel great inside—I felt weak. When I went into that 1990 Olympia, I was the most feminine-looking I’d ever been.”

The result was not victory but a hard lesson that Bev wouldn’t forget. She came in second to Lenda Murray, a woman who had, in Bev’s words, “the exotic look, complete with implants, good balance, a small waist, and big shoulders.” She was also more muscular than Bev had allowed herself to become. Indeed, there were critics who said Bev didn’t deserve to win even second place. By being untrue to herself, she had been beaten at her own game.

For the next year, she prepared with a different resolve. “They went for the big muscular? Damn, I can give them bigger muscular,” she thought. “I’ll go all-out, because that’s what I know how to do.” She designed her diet carefully to hold muscle, and aimed to come in twenty pounds heavier than ever before. She also astounded clients in her gym by such training feats as doing thirty repetitions of leg presses of nearly 700 pounds—something they stood around watching in awe. Before the Las Vegas contest, she had leapfrogged a full mile three times a week, but for this contest, she mustered even more of her famous discipline and concentration. For six months, she trained her heart out—and most important, she loved it. At last, she was following nothing but her own instincts. She was doing what had made her a champion in the first place: pleasing herself and testing her limits just to see if she could.

There was another edge to this preparation for the 1991 Ms. Olympia. Because she was thirty-six and thinking about having children, it was likely to be her last contest. “Steve’s parents were divorced,” she explained, “and he wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about having kids as I was. But I come from such a great family that to me, it was just as important as winning championships. My parents were proud of me, which made me feel terrific, but I was no more important to them than the other four kids. They realized being a good person was just as important as anything else. I’d like to pass that on. I’ve done all the things that women don’t normally do in their lives. Now I’d like to do something that women normally do.”

By the time Bev got to Los Angeles, everything had conspired to make the contest a historic one. It was the first bodybuilding event ever to be telecast live in the United States, and the first one to allow two full days for three rounds of judging. Moreover, word had spread that Bev was training to press the limits. She had become, in her own words, “the biggest, tightest, most muscular woman there. All the women were huge—but I was massive.”

Since the other contestants—including defending champion Lenda Murray—might as well have stayed in the dressing room if muscularity was the point, it was no surprise when Bev won the first two rounds by an unusual and definitive four points. With such a commanding lead, no one had ever lost the contest. At the end of the third and last round, the stupendously muscular Bev Francis stood hand in hand with the exotic Lenda Murray as they waited for the judges’ decision. In the hall, thousands of people held their breath. So did millions in front of their television sets. If Bev won, she would triumph in her five-year quest for the Olympia tide. Moreover, women’s bodybuilding would be acknowledging that it had changed forever.

The verdict came. Bev Francis’s name was read first—meaning she had come in second. A groan came up from the audience. “I was so confident,” Bev remembered, “because I knew I was ahead—and I’d done everything beautifully in the third round. It was all I could do to congratulate Lenda, smile at the audience, and walk off the stage.” According to the judges’ count, she had lost by one point.

If there was any doubt about the reason for Bev Francis’s defeat, it was laid to rest when bodybuilding authorities moved immediately to change competition rules in order to penalize extreme muscularity. Later, when Bev became a token part of a few judging processes herself, she heard how these new standards were discussed and applied. “I listened to all the criteria,” she explained, “and they’re really weird. The judges would say, ‘A woman shouldn’t be judged as too muscular if she’s carrying what her frame can handle.’ Now, obviously, every woman has a different frame. I think my frame can handle a lot more muscle than some others. But from another point of view, if your frame couldn’t handle the muscle, how could you carry it in the first place?”

Having advanced the cause of female strength by her gender-bending appearance in 1983, popularized it in Pumping Iron II, spawned a new generation of women bodybuilders who pushed boundaries for the next six years—and finally decided to go for broke herself—Bev had become too challenging. She was upsetting enough on her own, but having demonstrated her influence over other women, she had become even more so. Like other areas of work in which the first woman meets resistance, gets a little worn down, but is followed by a second wave that threatens to become a critical mass, bodybuilding as a sport decided to send a wider message by disciplining the pioneer.

In a way, Bev’s success as a powerlifter had been analogous to that of a woman entrepreneur or any other independent worker in an area where objective criteria make victory hard to conceal. But in bodybuilding contests, as in corporate and academic settings, victory could be negated—and discipline reasserted—through the highly subjective process by which a winner was selected, whether for promotion, tenure, or a bodybuilding prize. We had come full circle, back to the experience that any high school girl who ever tried out for cheerleader remembers: being chosen.

By the following year, the message sent by Bev’s defeat had been heard and heeded. Entrants seemed to press no limits. Flex, one of many magazines devoted to bodybuilding, described that 1992 Ms. Olympia as “the most lackluster in the contest’s 12 year history. Talk of the distaff side of the sport being in crisis was rampant.”7 Though contestants were more muscular than they probably would have been without Bev, they still weren’t testing the boundaries. Nonetheless, the judges’ standards were questioned as never before. Once the possibilities embodied by Bev had been seen, it was hard to unsee them.

For Bev herself, however, what could have been a megaloss turned out to be less personally damaging than the loss the year before. In some ways, it wasn’t a loss at all. “For so long, I’d wanted the Olympia—and then all of a sudden, it didn’t mean anything. I knew I was the best there that day, and I didn’t win, so what’s the point? I’d achieved what I wanted to do. I always wanted to show how muscular a woman could get—and I did that. I wanted people to go ‘Ah!’ when I walked out—and I got that. If you win titles in bodybuilding, it means they agree with your look. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter—as long as you’re satisfied with what you’ve done with your own body.

“When I speak to people about bodybuilding,” she said, gesturing toward the gym outside our door, “I always say that the worst that can happen to you, even if you never win anything, is that you improve your body—you become better than you were. What’s so bad about that?”

There is a quality about Bev that evokes a Zen master. She says things that would seem too simple, were they not coming from someone who has earned the right to say them. No one could have worked harder toward a goal; yet about her unfair defeat, she said, “In the end, it’s better to feel at peace with yourself.” No one could have created more whole-body transformations over the course of a decade—changes she literally had to eat, sleep, and breathe every day—yet after being denied recognition in what would have been an especially humiliating way for most women, she remained philosophical. Where did all this come from?

It was a question that could have elicited a complicated explanation, but Bev responded with its simple roots in her childhood. “My family were basic people,” she explained. “If the world were filled with people like them, it would be a good place. The older I get, the more I appreciate them. We didn’t have a lot of money, so very early I got an appreciation of things that were really important—like doing your best at whatever you do, not hurting anyone, and being able to laugh at yourself.

“Beyond that, there was a real spark in me. I always liked to do what the boys did, and I was mistaken for a boy all the time. My sister wasn’t as athletic. She was quiet, more malleable—I was rebellious.

“We lived simply, from paycheck to paycheck, but every year we’d go camping—and that was heaven for me. I loved being out in the bush, with no one around, shooting rabbits, building a fire, surviving in nature. It was something that was always in me.”

Bev had admired the aborigines of her native Australia and the Native Americans of this continent. She had read about them and wanted to be like them. With her friends in the neighborhood, all boys, she played made-up games of endurance—who could go longest without water on the hottest days (it was always Bev), or who could walk barefoot for the longest distance on the tar roads around Geelong when the sun turned them into bubbling black ribbons of tar (again, it was always Bev). The first restriction she remembered was being told she couldn’t continue to take her shirt off in the heat, as the boys did. She thought that was clearly unfair. With a child’s sense of justice, she had a vision of a genderless world.

“In some ways, my parents were traditional mother/father figures, with Mom at home and Dad bringing home the paycheck,” she said, “but all the boys learned how to cook basic foods, and the girls helped with things like pouring concrete in the backyard. The jobs were all mixed up. Even though Mom was good at sewing and cooking, she helped Dad, just like he had no problem with cooking. My mother was very active, but it was my father who loved sports—for their own sake, not for competition.”

The message of uniqueness—of winning just by doing one’s personal best—had been instilled in each of the five children. “Our parents just said, ‘Whatever you do, do it well.’ That made us all secure, because not one of us was better than the next, and yet each was special. My sister and brothers weren’t jealous of me, and they’re still not. They’re proud. I see in so many families that if one person achieves something, the others hold it against them. When good fortune falls on any of us, we’re happy. We don’t say, ‘I wish that was me.’ ”

Her three brothers were athletic too, though not to the same degree as Bev. In later life, they became a teacher, a banker, and an artist. “They’re into this macho image, but they all have a roundness about them,” Bev said. “They’re not afraid to display their emotions. The guys in this country seem afraid to show their emotional side. My brothers are all funny, and not so different from me and my sister. She became a teacher, like my dad.

“Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.”

Given this philosophy, who were her women friends? “You’ll be surprised,” Bev said, “but Rachel McLish has become a good friend.” It was true, I hadn’t expected to hear the name of this superfeminine bodybuilder who had picked up the lucrative product endorsements denied to Bev because of her muscularity and to Carla Dunlap because of her race. “I could see the media were trying to divide us,” Bev explained, “so I wrote Rachel a letter and told her that I appreciated what she’d done with her career. I hadn’t been trying to do anything to her in Las Vegas—I was just doing what I did. We’re two of the most prominent women in bodybuilding, so I didn’t see any reason for us to be at odds.

“Rachel answered, and now Steve and I see her and her husband whenever we’re in California. I appreciate that she grew up poor and had to scrap for everything she got. I think her success and her marriage to a successful movie producer has made her feel secure for the first time. We keep in fairly constant contact. I also get along very well with Cory, who won the Olympia six times. They’re two of my best friends.”

It was interesting to find these women still as uncompetitive as they had seemed in Pumping Iron II, especially when compared with their male counterparts. It was also interesting that Bev had been the first to reach out across the divisions that did exist. Perhaps it was her secure upbringing, or her sense of being part of the future. Or perhaps it was her gift of androgyny. Psychological tests show that males with more feminine qualities and females with more masculine ones—in other words, individuals with a greater range of human qualities—are more flexible, creative, and have healthier self-esteem, if only because they’re not envying what they’re missing. Having been lucky enough to escape a lot of gender training, she seemed happy to be who she was. “I’ve always liked my body,” she says. “It seemed pleasing and compact. I’ve never wanted anything dangling between my legs.” Having enjoyed being a female and not felt penalized for it, she hadn’t internalized society’s low estimate of her group. She could like other women.

Ever since childhood, however, the androgyny of her body and behavior had given her the unusual experience of choosing her gender. In women’s rest rooms, for example, she was often greeted by someone explaining kindly that the men’s room was next door. “I always understand, and it doesn’t bother me,” Bev said with her usual calm. “People just aren’t used to seeing a female body with this much muscle. I only feel angry when I say I’m a woman and they don’t believe me.” Like those tests in which drawings of nude males and females wearing opposite-gender headgear (a woman in a football helmet, say, or a man in a bonnet) are presented to children, most of whom label the figure with the gender of the headgear, Bev was living proof that the conventions of gender are often more important than the physical fact of sex. Though she makes no attempt to present herself as a man, Bev’s existence outside the narrow range of “feminine” means she is often perceived as a man.

Sometimes, she herself has debated which gender it would be wise to be. When her motorcycle headlight failed on a moonless stretch of country road in Australia, for instance, she was confronted with three choices. “I could keep going and risk running off the road into a tree,” she explained. “Or I could make clear that I was a woman by taking off my helmet and risk having a car stop for the wrong reason. Or, with my helmet on, I could look like a man and take a chance that drivers might be afraid and not stop at all.”

In the end, she decided that looking like a man was the safest alternative. Only after a truckdriver stopped for what he thought was a male motorcyclist in trouble did she judge him to be okay, take her helmet off, and surprise him by being a different gender. “He was a nice guy,” she said. “He drove slowly so I could use his headlights to get into the next town.”

That choice was no accident. “It’s always a fear of mine, to be raped. When I see a rape on TV, I go crazy. Having someone else’s will forced on you is horrifying. I’m stronger than almost any man, and I have little fear in the street. I would hate to hurt anyone, but if they were going to hurt me, I would hurt them—no trouble. It upsets me that most women can’t do that. But if someone has a gun, that’s a different story. Still, I know how lucky I am—there are almost no men I’m afraid of.

“I also think basic strength and fitness make you hold yourself differently. You have a different posture and you give off a different aura—you’re not helpless or weak. It’s so important for women to develop their physical strength so they’re not afraid of men. I would get them to weight train, develop cardiovascular fitness, and then I would urge every woman to learn some sort of martial arts.

“I like toughness. Women should be tough. Having a baby is one of the hardest things to do. When women tell me they can’t push a weight, I say, ‘If you’ve had a baby, you can do anything.’ Muscle isn’t a male thing, it’s a human thing.

“But I know I have different ideas on sexual identity. For instance, when you meet someone, I don’t see why you have to know whether they’re a man or a woman. Are you going to treat them differently? You shouldn’t.”

I walked out of the gym and back into the real world of small suburban shops. Women were doing the daily maintenance chores of carrying grocery bags and picking up the dry cleaning. It was six o’clock, and most shoppers were probably doing family chores after work, yet there wasn’t a man in sight. Even Bev Francis, the strongest woman in the world, was now living here. Meanwhile, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the strongest man in the world, had become an international celebrity whose last movie paid him fifteen million dollars. Maybe we as women aren’t ready for a Bev Francis either, but suddenly the injustice of it all came together—and seemed overwhelming.

As I drove back, I looked out the window at the fields of Long Island. I could imagine the ghosts of strong women who must have walked and worked them over the centuries, from Native Americans who roamed over this land to immigrants who turned it into fields of potatoes. When had women allowed ourselves to become so afraid of our strength? Somehow, that brought images of my own family to my mind. I saw the sunburned, well-muscled arms of my maternal grandmother, who worked in her vegetable garden and did other hard tasks, yet concealed her strength under long sleeves when she dressed up and wanted to be ladylike. Her working-class husband needed the money she earned, and she wished that he could keep her in leisure, that she didn’t have to do such physical chores. I remembered the soft, plump body of my paternal grandmother, whose well-to-do husband supported her intellectual and community work, but whose life was certainly shortened by the absence of all physical activity. Neither woman had lived in a body she could fully enjoy.

I could feel again my mother’s soft body. Only from photographs did I know the strong, smiling, basketball-playing young woman she once had been, or could I imagine the confident woman she might have become. I remembered my sister struggling with endless diets to control our family heritage of excess weight, but living in a world where sports or physical activity was so rare that even stepping down on a moving escalator became a frightening feat. I thought of my own years of fierce pride in spurning sports and undertaking nothing except dancing. “If there were an Olympic team for sitting still,” I used to say, “I would be on it.” The truth is that I was sure my lack of early training would make a fool of me.

With that long-overdue admission, part of the past came back––not as it had looked from the outside but as my body felt it. I saw tree branches up close, with a lake shining in the distance. It was my view from a perch in a favorite tree I’d climbed as a little girl of five or six. Each leaf was distinct, and so was a feeling of freedom—the sort that comes only from what we do for ourselves. I remembered the feel of rough bark as I climbed up high, just to see how far I could go, with no one to impress but myself. No wonder we hide our strong women, I thought. We don’t want to be reminded of what we’re missing.

My feeling of anger hadn’t been on Bev’s account, I realized. She had pressed her limits, and so was content. Moreover, she was in the right place, teaching the women who needed her. I was angry for and at myself, one of the countless women who’d gone along with society’s denial that we might find any delight in physical daring. How much of the world had I missed while living in my head? If each cell in our bodies is an outpost of our brains, what might I have learned?

I’ll never know who that adventurous little girl might have become. But at least I know she’s still there—waiting to enter the present.

Whatever you’ve imagined your limits of strength and daring to be, the strongest woman in the world can inspire you to go beyond them. That’s what champions are for.