The System Just Broke and Nobody Wants to Admit It

 

Shaun Clarida won in Japan and the silence is deafening. No headlines. No manufactured controversy. Just a 5'2" man shattering the hierarchy that bodybuilding has defended for decades: that divisions are unbreakable borders and that absolute size is destiny. His victory in the Open wasn’t an accident or a gift from the judges. It was a public execution of everything we thought we knew about this sport.

Clarida is a two-time Mr. Olympia 212 champion (2020 and 2022), with a lifetime qualification to that division and guaranteed entry into the 2025 Open. But the narrative just got messy: he just conquered the Open in Japan, something Keone Pearson, who beat him at this year’s Olympia 212, couldn’t do in Prague a few weeks ago when he shared the stage with former Mr. Olympia Samson Dauda and champion Martin Fitzwater. Pearson showed up soft at the Olympia, and Clarida should have destroyed him that night. The judges got it wrong. Now Clarida answers not with complaints, but with an absolute victory in the division that’s supposedly too big for him, and that turned out to be too big for Pearson. In Japan he left Joan Pradells behind, a man who recently went toe to toe with Dauda and whom many are already calling the future Mr. Olympia. Clarida should have won the Olympia this year. Period.

The question that blows everything up: will they let him compete in both divisions next year? If they say yes, we have an athlete capable of winning two Olympia titles in the same night. If they say no, the federation is admitting it’s afraid of what he represents: a man who obliterates the narrative that size is everything. Clarida isn’t an anomaly. He’s proof that density, proportion, and brutal intensity beat empty mass. Look at the pattern: Chris Bumstead, six time Classic Physique Mr. Olympia in 2024, stepped into the Open in Prague and couldn’t beat Fitzwater. Urs Kalecinski, who spent years in Bumstead’s shadow, moved up to Open and won multiple pro shows this year. Pearson, dominant in 212, couldn’t win in Open. But Clarida, who finished behind Pearson at the Olympia, goes to Japan and wins. Why did Bumstead and Pearson, absolute kings in their divisions, fail in Open? Why did the guys who couldn’t beat them go on to win Open contests?

What hits me in the gut about Clarida isn’t just his physique. It’s his way. He trains alone in a home gym, far from the circus of the big prep camps, far from the coaches who charge fortunes to post tear jerking Instagram stories. He reminds me of 1990s Dorian Yates, locked away in Temple Gym, a damp basement in Birmingham that looked more like a prison cell than an iron sanctuary. Yates trained in the dark, no cameras, no witnesses. He’d come out once a year, annihilate everyone at the Olympia, go back to his dungeon, and do it again. Six times. Clarida follows that exact blueprint: silence, work, destruction.

After the pandemic I bought equipment and never went back to a commercial gym. Years later, the results blow away anything I ever achieved surrounded by endless mirrors and corporate playlists. It’s not nostalgia: real training happens when nobody’s watching. No distractions. No external validation. Just you, the iron, and the choice to break or quit. Clarida gets that. That’s why his physique doesn’t lie. Every fiber tells the story of reps done in solitude, sets taken to failure with nobody there to clap. There are no spectators when you build something real.

Modern bodybuilding is sick with spectacle. Influencers with 100k followers who’ve never stepped on stage. Athletes more worried about engagement than symmetry. Clarida is the antidote: less theater, more results. His Japan win isn’t going viral because it didn’t come wrapped in pre packaged drama. But for those who understand, it’s the most important moment of the season. A small man, by this industry’s absurd standards, just proved he can beat the giants on their own turf and expose the contradictions of the entire system.

Will he be a dangerous player in 2025? The question insults the evidence. Clarida is already dangerous. What’s coming is just the public confirmation of what some of us already knew: size without quality is an illusion, the Open isn’t reserved for six-footers, and real bodybuilding, the kind that builds legends, still lives in quiet gyms where nobody’s filming TikToks and everyone bleeds for real. Clarida isn’t asking permission. He’s taking what’s his.