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Andreas Munzer became the first bodybuilder to have a play written about him. Well, it was part of a play at least, a very long play by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, best known for the novel The Piano Teacher and who last month won the 2004 Nobel Prize for literature. The play was called Ein Sportstück (A Sports Play). When it premiered in Vienna in 1998 it received a 55-minute standing ovation. Jelinek's themes were intellectual and postmodern. Ein Sportstück was about mediated realities, lives experienced through other mediums: television, movies, sport. She used Andi's hollowed body to stress the primacy of surface over depth. She said that Andi's freaky frame had been manufactured for rapid consumption and then thrown away. You had to be patient to get to Andi's bit: Ein Sportstück lasted for five hours.
And so Andi's body became metaphor, too. He represented something to bodybuilding, and something else to the wider world. In death, Andi had become someone on to whom things could be projected: ideas, theories, prejudices. He could be interpreted, reinterpreted, misinterpreted.
My vision of Andi was mediated, too. I had the raw facts of his life and death; they had all been well reported. I had the views of other bodybuilders, some of whom had been Andi's friends. I had some theories of my own about him. But I was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to get any closer.
Andi rode the curve. He made the deal. He played the zugzwang. In Munich, he doubled himself. He understood what it would take to make it with a body like his in the earliest years of the era of the freak.
The novelist Timothy O'Grady once wrote: 'The spectacle of greatness is thrilling, alluring, intoxicating. It can make the beholder want to do the same thing, breathe the same air.'
Andi saw greatness in Schwarzenegger, but that was through the simplicity of teenage ambition. Later, as he ascended to become the best bodybuilder in the German-speaking world, he looked at the small gap between his own excellence and that of the five or six men who existed above him. He thought about what it might take to close that gap. Andi was no freak. But he could turn his skin into paper and his veins into ringroads around his stripped physique. Andi could take the stage glowing with hardness and he could do it several times a year.
The effort it took was difficult to imagine. Andi had picked the toughest battleground, the most elusive state to appear in and maintain. His unique selling point demanded much of him.
Once he had chosen, he could not turn back. There was probably a moment, a tipping point, where he might have pulled out, perhaps when he first became aware of the pains in his stomach and sought a health cure for them. Only Andi would know for sure. But he was a bodybuilder and bodybuilding was about excess. After a while, you were surrounded by so much of it, it became impossible to see how much was too much: because almost everything was too much. In bodybuilding, the only response to failure was growth. That was the law of muscle. Stressed to failure, it grew. When Andi met failure, he grew to defeat it.
Andi gave it everything because that's what he demanded of himself. He had built an extraordinary body by any standards. He had decided to find out what was possible for him. He wanted to get as high on the curve as he could, as all of us do. He understood the risks. He took his courage in his hands. He pushed towards his limits. He discovered where they were. In that regard, Andi had lived ferociously, he had strived for the best that he was capable of. I saw it as an act of great bravery to live in that manner.
Andreas Munzer strived and strived, and he found out what he could do. He was able to manufacture one of the 10 best bodies from six billion on earth. In his curious arena, he had almost ascended to the top of the game. He answered every question he asked of himself. He did not die wondering.
I saw unrecognised honour in what he had achieved. He was more than just a dead guy who had taken too many drugs. He was not the end of bodybuilding as a sport. He was a symbol of what it sometimes took to succeed
· Extracted from Muscle: a Writer's Trip Through a Sport with no Boundaries, by Jon Hotten (Yellow Jersey Press, £10.99)