He Will Indeed Be Back

COLUMBUS, Ohio —  Fresh from a big victory in his campaign for Propositions 57 and 58, his political fortunes at a peak, the governor of California will spend this weekend celebrating. In Ohio. “I love it there,” he says. “It’s like a second home.”

Californians may not know it, but their governor does not belong just to them. For more than 30 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger has cultivated personal and business ties to, of all places, Columbus.

On Friday, the governor will fly to the city, as he has for the last 16 years, to preside over a massive three-day convention now known as the Arnold Fitness Weekend.

It brings 80,000 people to this town of 711,000. More than 11,000 are athletes, topping the number of competitors at the Summer Olympics.

Events include the Arnold Strongest Man Contest, the Arnold Olympic Weightlifting Championships, the Arnold Classic Arm Wrestling Challenge, the Arnold Gymnastics Challenge, the Arnold Martial Arts World Games, the Arnold Cheerleading and Dance Team National Championships, and the Arnold 5K Pump and Run.

The centerpiece is a bodybuilding tournament called the Arnold Classic. Posters advertising the weekend show California’s governor in a black sleeveless shirt, his arm muscles bulging, with the slogan “More than before in 2004.”

“The Arnold,” as some locals call the weekend, is not Schwarzenegger’s only tie to Ohio’s largest city. For a governor who sees his role as selling California, his work in Columbus provides an example of how he markets a place.

Over the decades, the governor has quietly made Columbus a laboratory of Schwarzeneggerian synergy.

He owns a share in one of the region’s largest malls, the Easton Town Center. He tracked down the tank he drove in the Austrian army and loaned it to a nearby military museum, instantly creating a tourist attraction. He established a beachhead for his major charity effort, the After School All-Stars, and has served as grand marshal for the Columbus Day Parade.

Columbus even played a role in Schwarzenegger’s introduction to politics. It was here, in 1988, that the governor was first introduced to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who later appointed Schwarzenegger chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

That fueled his interest in politics. And in an echo of his emphasis on bipartisanship in California politics, the Republican Schwarzenegger long ago built a close relationship with this city’s Democratic leadership.

“We view him as a citizen of Columbus,” says Mayor Michael Coleman, a Democrat who befriended Schwarzenegger and has visited the governor at his home in Los Angeles. “He is truly loved in this city. It’s not because he was a movie star. It’s not because he is a governor. It’s because he’s always here, and people know his impact.”

Dan Schnur, a California-based GOP consultant, notes that no Republican has won the presidency without winning Ohio. “If he set up a bodybuilding competition in the nation’s most important swing state almost 30 years before running, then he’s a better advance planner than we knew,” Schnur says with a laugh.

Friends say that for Schwarzenegger, Columbus represents not a political or business opportunity but a tangible connection to his bodybuilding past. His strong feeling for the place is a reminder that for all his success in movies and politics, the seven-time Mr. Olympia still considers himself an athlete at heart.

“I go every year, and I see Arnold every year,” says John McCarthy, executive director of the International Health Racquet & Sports Assn. “The event is a national mecca for everyone, men and women, who are serious about bodybuilding and fitness. But a significant part to Arnold is his coming together with the guys he started working out with. It’s sort of like a family reunion.”

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Schwarzenegger’s kinship with Columbus began with a local lawyer named Jim Lorimer.

In 1970, the former FBI agent and former chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee for women’s athletics was asked to run the world weightlifting championships in Columbus at Veterans Memorial Auditorium. But he thought weightlifting alone would not draw a large enough crowd to pay for the event.

So he decided to put together a Mr. World bodybuilding contest to coincide with Olympic weightlifting. He made a list of the top six bodybuilders in the world.

One was a young Austrian.

Schwarzenegger was already scheduled to compete in London the night before the Columbus competition. But the bodybuilder agreed to board a plane late that night and fly to New York, where Lorimer met him. They flew to Columbus together.

Schwarzenegger not only won the competition. He also left impressed by Lorimer’s attention to detail, recalling it as “the best organized event I have ever been in.” The then-23-year-old Austrian told Lorimer that when he retired, he planned to go into the promotion of the sport and would return to Columbus to be his business partner.

“My reaction was, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” recalls Lorimer. “I didn’t realize what a goal-setting person he is.”In 1975, immediately after retiring from competition, Schwarzenegger flew to Columbus and met with Lorimer. The future California governor proposed a partnership to put on bodybuilding events. Lorimer would handle the details and arrangements; Schwarzenegger would raise money to make it happen. They shook hands. Twenty-nine years later, the business partners still do not have a written contract.

Their personal and business relationship is another example of Schwarzenegger’s strategy of identifying partners in each area of his life -- from investments to charitable work -- and staying with them for decades.

“I’m the backup man,” says Lorimer, 77. “In every area that he works in, he has a backup man. I’m the backup man for the fitness area.”

In 1988, Schwarzenegger suggested they start an annual bodybuilding contest with his own name on it. The first Arnold Classic was held in Columbus in 1989, and the partners immediately began plans to expand.

Their first tool was prize money. While the governor had never won more than $1,000 at an event, The Arnold’s bodybuilding champions now take home $100,000 and a Hummer.

Schwarzenegger and Lorimer say one of their goals is to have the world take bodybuilding more seriously as a sport. To that end, they have tried to add at least one sport to the Arnold Classic each year, and in the process show the link between strength training and athleticism.

They invited companies that sell everything from nutritional supplements to free weights to become exhibitors, and soon had to rent space in the city’s convention center. The Arnold Fitness Weekend now fills all 1 million square feet of the convention center, which was expanded five years ago in part because of the event’s growth. The Greater Columbus Convention & Visitors Bureau estimates spending by visitors during the weekend at $20 million.

“Sometimes you wonder, ‘How much bigger does the thing have to get?’ ” says David Sandler, a Florida International University professor who was strength and conditioning coach at the University of Miami. “But Arnold wants to keep bringing something new to the table each year to show the substance behind this whole area of life. Even with all he has going on, he does still care about the industry and the people.”

This weekend, Sandler is hosting a new event, the Arnold Strength Training Summit, which will offer 15 hours of lectures from scientists and practitioners on fitness. Lorimer also has included for the first time international competitions in fencing and table tennis.

They join a list of 18 events, including seven Olympic sports. There’s a gymnastics tournament with 3,500 competitors, a national cheerleading championship for 4,000 youngsters from first to 12th grade, a contest in the Brazilian form of jujitsu called Gracie, and a competition among the world’s 40 top arm wrestlers -- who will be filmed for a “Pumping Iron”-style documentary called “Pulling John.”

Out of concern that bodybuilding honors mass and not innovative posing routines, Schwarzenegger has established a separate $10,000 prize this year for the best posing routine.

The Arnold Strongest Man Contest is the final event of a five-stop world tour to select the world’s strongest man. The contest includes a Hummer tire lift, and, as a finale, the Farmers Walk, in which competitors must lift and carry 865 pounds of railroad ties up an incline.

Lorimer says there is method to this collection of events, and how he presents them over the three-day weekend.

To build harmony among the fractious martial arts, all 12 different disciplines and 4,000 martial arts competitors will use the same arena this weekend. Frustrated with the poor showing by the U.S. in Olympic weightlifting, Lorimer and Schwarzenegger have put the World Powerlifting Finals in the same area of the convention center as The Arnold’s Olympic weightlifting competition. Their hope is that the power lifters will want to try the Olympic sport.

“Arnold is very concerned that America is not stronger in this event,” says Lorimer, who notes that the governor is weighing an offer to be honorary captain for the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team in Athens this summer. Every year Schwarzenegger hands out awards to the winners of each event, but he will not limit his time in Columbus to the Arnold Classic.

On Friday night, he’ll attend a fundraiser for the After-School All-Stars, which in Columbus provides after-school programs in athletics and academics.

“We bring resources to the table so a large number of children will be served,” says Suzanne Irwin, who sits on the Columbus board of After-School All-Stars.

During the weekend, Schwarzenegger, accompanied by his wife, Maria Shriver, and their children, is scheduled to visit the million-square-foot Easton Town Center, which he owns in partnership with retailing giant the Limited and developer Georgetown Co. The mall is mostly outdoors and laid out like a small-town main street. It includes upscale shops like Restoration Hardware, nightclubs and restaurants, and a 30-screen multiplex.

“If you hang around the mall enough, you’ll see Arnold once in a while,” Jay White, a factory worker, said as he waited for a table at the mall’s California Pizza Kitchen. “People have become accustomed to seeing him around.”

At one point, Schwarzenegger sought out a piece of his own personal history for a Planet Hollywood restaurant in the mall: the tank he drove in the mid-1960s in the Austrian army.

Schwarzenegger had held on to the serial number of the 47-ton, American-made, M 47 tank. In a brief interview, the governor recalled fondly how he stored barbells in the tank for use after a hard day of drills near the Czechoslovakian border.

“When everyone was finished, the drills were finished and the dinner was finished,” the governor said, “I would take the equipment out and I would work out two hours.”

Acting on a request from Schwarzenegger, the Austrian ministry of defense found the tank: It had been buried as a Cold War-era fortification. The Austrian government dug it up and gave it to him, and Schwarzenegger paid to have it shipped to Columbus, says Warren Motts.

Motts is a former Army photographer who opened the Motts Military Museum in the suburb of Groveport in 1998. After the Planet Hollywood restaurant closed, Motts wrote Schwarzenegger a letter asking about the tank. The governor eventually agreed to loan the tank to Motts’ museum. It now sits in a yard behind the museum building, across from two Iraqi guns captured during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Volunteers help keep it in top condition; the governor occasionally drives his tank when he’s in town.

“Your governor is a real nice fellow,” says Motts. “He’s no different than the people around here.”

That sense of connection to California’s governor is palpable in part because it is well known here that Schwarzenegger could have left Columbus behind.

Las Vegas and Moscow are among the cities that have tried to lure away the Arnold Fitness Weekend. But Schwarzenegger and Lorimer say they have stayed out of loyalty to the town -- and because their team of 400 volunteers is irreplaceable. The Arnold Fitness Weekend is committed to Columbus through 2012.

Lorimer and some locals admit to nervousness that Schwarzenegger’s new political status will change The Arnold. Some of those fears have been stoked by the conspicuous presence in Columbus of an advance team handling gubernatorial security. A few of the governor’s California critics are poised to seize on the event.

“I don’t think the bodybuilding special interests are going to win the benefit of his governorship,” says Doug Heller, a consumer activist who maintains the website arnoldwatch.org and expresses concern about what Hummer’s support of the event might mean for state policy. “But a trip to Ohio to watch men flex is not part of running the state of California.”

Lorimer points out that Schwarzenegger’s schedule is as busy as ever. He’ll still pose for hundreds of photos with fans who have bought $350 VIP ticket packages to attend all events. He’ll chat up a large group of chiropractors who visit each year. He’ll mingle with exhibitors in the convention center. On Sunday morning, he’ll give his annual training seminar.

The governor’s personal enthusiasm for the town and the event does not appear diminished. For weeks, he has been regaling disbelieving political aides with previews of what they’ll see if they choose to come to Columbus.

The fitness press has been full of reassurance that politics will not rob Schwarzenegger of his roots. The governor continues to allow a column called Ask Arnold to be published under his name in Muscle & Fitness; the March edition focuses on exercises for the lower back. The Arnold Classic’s website declares: “Arnold will be at the weekend the way he always has been. Don’t let rumors keep you away from the weekend. Arnold wouldn’t miss the chance to see you.”

Adds Lorimer, with a laugh: “Out of 11,000 athletes, I only have 26 bodybuilders. It’s hardly just a bodybuilding contest anymore.... In fact, it’s gotten completely out of control.”