Nwe final round at the Mr O
From bb.com
After the posing scores have been shown, the top 10 will be announced and then that group will be whittled down to the final six. At that point, it will get really interesting with an innovation that constitutes the most radical change in the history of bodybuilding contests - the Challenge Round.
New Round- The Challenge Round
As the final six remain onstage, the scoreboard will show their standings by way of point totals. The first-placed athlete will be assigned six points, the second five points, and so on down to the sixth-placed athlete who will be awarded one point. If this new system had been part of last year's contest, the scoring would have stood as follows.
Ronnie Coleman: 6 points
Jay Cutler: 5 points
Dexter Jackson: 4 points
Dennis James: 3 points
Günter Schlierkamp: 2 points
Kevin Levrone: 1 point
Here, the contest starts all over again. Now, the athletes are out to get extra points and (unlike the present situation, where the guy with the lowest points is the winner) the athlete with the most points at the end of the Challenge Round will win. This will take bodybuilding into a combative mano-a-mano arena never before seen.
Head-To-Head:
Each competitor, starting with the sixth-placed athlete, calls one individual pose of his choice against the other finalists. Each one of those poses counts as two points going to the winner of the pose, which is added to his placing. Using last year's contest as the example, Levrone (sixth) would call a pose against Schlierkamp (fifth), then James (fourth) and so on up to Coleman (first). The rest of the top 6 athletes would follow suit in ascending order of their placings.
Here's where the excitement mounts. The 11 judges will be holding electronic devices that connect them to the scoreboard and, as each pose is completed, they will press the devices and their decision will be flashed onto the scoreboard.
Strategy:
One caveat is that an athlete can only call a particular pose twice. For example, Levrone's strongest pose is probably the hand-clasped most-muscular, but he would only be able to use it twice. This is where strategy comes in. Would Levrone use his strongest pose against the lower-placed athletes or save it for the top two guys in pursuit of points?
The system will give all six finalists the chance to go against each other and will result in an ever-changing scoreboard, which would bring unprecedented drama to the event.
If this procedure had been in effect at the 2001 Olympia, the whole contest could have come down to the last final pose between Coleman and Cutler. If the system had been in force in 2002, then a late-charging Schlierkamp might have climbed to third or second instead of placing fifth.
