The difference here is what ‘“means” meant to Villegas and the crowd. Half the room booed Villegas while Natalia Abraham Coelho, the woman who won the Women’s Physique title last year, refused to engage in Villegas’ fight talk. Both competed on Friday (Natalia Abraham Coelho won, FYI). In the men’s division, Nick Walker picked up his first Mr. Olympia Open title.
This summer, Dorian Yates, a bodybuilding legend in his own right, gave an interview with Thomas DeLauer about blocky arms and blocky shoulders. For Dorian these bodyparts were telltale signs of an often unspoken transgression in bodybuilding: implants. Dorian remembered an old IFBB rule against implants, questioned whether it still existed and then launched into a wide-ranging conversation about the ‘cosmetic’ side of bodybuilding.
Ironically, when Yates was competing in the 1990s, his generation came under scrutiny for their ‘bubble guts’ and lack of symmetry. This included a public spat between Dorian and fellow legend Arnold Schwarzenneger. Where Arnold had a singular complaint, bubble guts, Dorian cited the laundry list of synthetics now changing bodybuilding. People were injecting oil, synthol, into their muscles. Others were now using a newer substance, Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) which was a plastic microsphere injected as a filler. For want of a better phrase, such things add ‘lumps and bumps’ to the muscles. In Dorian’s case, he mentioned an athlete with ‘golf balls’ in his lats.
His message at the end was simple. “This needs to stop right now.”
Rules and Misdemeanours
When Dorian, the Mass Monster of the 1990s, is worried about athlete health and boundary pushing, something is amiss. What is even stranger is that Dorian was criticising something which, for many years, had been a settled topic.
Looking back at the IFBB Professional Rulebook from 2003, there is a whole article (Article 13) on muscle implants. The rule, quite simply, was that they were banned outright. The only exception was breast implants (and that’s another article waiting to be written). Any ‘artificial improvements’ of the muscle were outlawed. I will say this as a lover of bodybuilding but I love that the sport is happy to say ‘we just want old-fashioned steroid muscles’.
Now the amateur IFBB has never dropped this idea. Their rulebook in 2026, posted on ifbb.com, makes clear that “implants or fluid injections causing the change of the natural shape of any other parts or muscles of the body,” were banned. This meant that muscular implants or synthetic oils were not allowed.
The Professional IFBB, which ran last weekend’s Olympia does not include that sentence. After a split between the professional and amateur league in the mid-2010s, the Professional IFBB created a newer, vaguer rulebook. For the pros, they cannot wear ornaments, jewellry or ‘artifical aids to the physique’ but there is no outright ban on fluid injections.
Villegas’ comments made that distinction rather public. After she lost to Coelho in 2025, she called the result an OIL-lympia which, by anyone’s estimation, is an amazing burn. PMMA, and oils were not, in her critique, muscle. Interestingly, a lot of big names in the sport classed her as a sore loser, including Shawn Ray and Bob Cicherillo. That is the same Shawn Ray who, during the 1990s, wanted to get judges to X-ray Flex Wheeler’s calves for implants (he later stated that this was him playing mind games).
Not to be deterred Villegas set out a timeline. She said that she first raised concerns after the Pittsburgh Pro in July 2025, three months before the Olympia. After she lost in Vegas she said a doctor connected with a PMMA clinic in Brazil contacted her with information about Coelho’s procedures. Now, obviously, none of this is hard evidence but it does show how deeply ingrained concerns about synthetic oils have become in bodybuilding.
How did we get here?
No, seriously. How did we get here?
I have written previously about the ‘death wish’ in professional bodybuilding wherein competitors, and even just people wanting to look better naked, are taking increasingly dangerous compounds to improve their physiques. How did we get from steroids to oils?
Well, before there was an oil, there was a steroid that also happened to swell. Formebolone, sold as Esiclene, came in small brown ampoules and, during the 1980s, bodybuilders noticed that a shot into a biceps, tricep, delt or calf left the part inflamed for about a week. So, if you needed to quickly add an extra inch before the stage, you just shot directly into the muscle. It was a crude approach, but some bodybuilders did it looking to find an edge. When formebolone became harder to source, bodybuilders went elsewhere.
Chris Clark was the first to find an alternative, supposedly coming up with the idea when on the toilet. Speaking with Dave Palumbo, Clark detailed his failed efforts with mineral oils (gave him fevers) or water-based injections (no clear improvements). He eventually settled on oil cut with lidocaine, to numb the injection, and alcohol which he sold as Pump-N-Pose. Pump-N-Pose became known as synthol fairly soon after (a point Palumbo confirmed due to his experiences selling it).
Synthol was sold as posing oil but its ‘off-brand’ use was as an injectable. As so often happens in bodybuilding, it was used to excess underground before a high-profile casualty. Milos Sarcev was, at the turn of the century, one of bodybuilding’s biggest stars. Lean and muscular, Milos had the misfortune of competing in an era with Ronnie Coleman and Jay Cutler among other bodybuilding legends. In 1998 he began injecting oil into his body and, in 2000, it nearly killed him.
At the time, Sarcev had just qualified for the 2000 Mr. Olympia. Again seeking that edge, his wife injected him with oil but did not aspirate the syringe (pulling back on the plunger to check for blood). The oil went into a vein, and from there to his heart, causing congestive heart failure. At one point doctors told him he had 24 hours to live but, miraculously, he survived. Once recovered, Sarcev was told by the IFBB that he could not compete in the Olympia. Now a coach, Sarcev has told his story as a warning to others. A fascinating postscript came in 2023 when Sarcev was on a panel with Dennis James and Dave Palumbo. Speaking candidly Palumbo claimed that he did not know a single athlete not ‘shooting’ something into their shoulders or arms to make them bigger.
What used to be synthol has evolved into PMMA. Unlike snythol, PMMA stays in the body. The body walls it off with collagen and it becomes a permanent feature. For those outside bodybuilding, it is already in use for face and butt procedures, often under the scientific-sounding name of ‘bioplasty.’ When researching this topic, I also came across a clinic in Mexico which boasted of increasing a patient’s biceps by 2 inches after 800 ml of 30% PMMA in each arm.
But Why?
Accusations about PMMA use are not just in the women’s category. Derek Lunsford, who was going for his third Olympia, has had to deny claims that he has used it. There have also been accusations levelled against former Olympia champions. For people like Dorian, the clear question to ask is why?
The answer appears to be because it works, and nothing stops it. Judges score what they can see from their seats. The pro rulebook no longer names fillers, and nobody at the Olympia gets an X-ray. A lagging calf can take a decade to bring up,1 whereas a clinic can do it in an afternoon. The Sandow is worth $600,000 outright, not including the sponsorship opportunities it brings.
Bodybuilding has always rewarded extremes. After Walker’s win, one commenter called the sport a freak show where the freaks always win. Fair enough. What has changed is the shelf life. Esiclene swelled a muscle for a week. Synthol lasted longer. PMMA gets walled off in collagen and stays there long after the tan washes off.
In 1904 Eugen Sandow published a book called Body-Building, or Man in the Making. The Mr. Olympia winner still takes home a statue of him. If Dorian is right about the golf balls, some of the building is now done by appointment.