Joe Weider, who rose from the streets of Montreal during the Great Depression to the millionaire owner of a fitness and bodybuilding empire, died Saturday in Los Angeles California.
Mr. Weider, who was 93, died of heart failure.
Mr. Weider left school in Montreal as a child to deliver groceries. As a teenager, he got tired of being roughed up by neighbourhood bullies. He overcame his fears by lifting weights, including a barbell made of a car axle.
He later moved to California, where he founded a publishing empire, reaching millions of readers with 16 magazines, including Muscle & Fitness, Men’s Fitness, Flex and Shape, and selling readers mail-order nutritional supplements.
By the 1980s he was marketing his weight-lifting equipment in 6,000 retail outlets and nutritional products in 12,000 stores in the United States alone. By the 1990s, he was selling in at least 60 countries and grossing hundreds of millions of dollars annually for his Los Angeles-based company, Weider America’s Total Fitness Company.
Consumers, experts and government agencies later challenged some ofhis product claims, and in 2002 he had to modify weight-gain claims for one of his products, Formula No. 7. In 2003, he sold his magazines for $US350-million but kept the other parts of his company.
Mr. Weider and his brother, Ben, also founded the International Federation of Body Builders, which sponsored the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia contests.
One of the participants in those contests was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who Mr. Weider brought to North America from Austria.
When Mr. Weider was attempting to land the then unknown Mr. Schwarzenegger a role in the the 1969 film Hercules, Mr. Weider overcame Mr. Schwarzenegger’s virtual total lack of English by convincing producers he was, in fact, a German Shakespearean actor.
Mr. Schwarzenegger, of course, went on to become an international movie star and the governor of the state of California. (th)
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