Investigating the sport my dad made famous
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How a tip at a funeral became a year-long investigation into the sport of bodybuilding.
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When Post investigative reporter Desmond Butler’s father, George Butler, died last year, work was the last thing on Desmond’s mind. But a friend of his father came to him with a tip – startling allegations in the world of bodybuilding, a sport Desmond’s father helped make famous through his film “Pumping Iron.”
What followed was a year-long investigation of the sport of bodybuilding and its culture. In today’s episode of “Post Reports," we explore what Desmond and a team of reporters at The Post uncovered. We explore the origins of bodybuilding, the risks and exploitation athletes face, and the family at the head of the sport.
This is just one story from “Built & Broken,” a Washington Post investigation of the world of bodybuilding. To read more about the findings in this episode check out the rest of the series.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just a warning before we start today's show, this episode deals with discussions of sexual |
| 0:07.3 | harassment and exploitation. |
| 0:12.9 | My colleague, Desmond Butler, is an investigative reporter for the post. |
| 0:16.8 | And he got a tip for a story at a moment when he really was not thinking about work. |
| 0:22.9 | My father died in October last year. |
| 0:25.8 | Oh, I'm sorry. |
| 0:27.3 | Well, I miss him. |
| 0:29.0 | So Desmond in this moment was trying to deal with his grief and thinking a lot about |
| 0:34.0 | his dad and his dad's legacy because his dad was someone who made a sport famous. |
| 0:41.3 | In the wake of that, I've been having to go through a lot of his stuff. |
| 0:49.6 | There's a cavernous basement. |
| 0:53.0 | This was his dark room, which is still in pretty good shape. |
| 0:58.8 | I spent a lot of time here as a kid sitting on the floor while he was developing his photos |
| 1:04.8 | and making prints. |
| 1:09.2 | My father's name was George Butler. |
| 1:11.4 | He was a photographer and a documentary filmmaker. |
| 1:14.3 | This is the mother load here. |
| 1:16.3 | Lots of boxes, lots of cobwebs. |
| 1:19.4 | A lot of my father's old film canisters from multiple different films are here. |
| 1:25.3 | You can smell the film. |
| 1:28.3 | He made a lot of films over decades. |
| 1:31.8 | They ranged from an Arctic exploration to the Mars rover program. |
... |
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