There are bodybuilding stories you have to go looking for. This isn’t one of them. Nick Walker just won the Mr. Olympia. Yes, Nick Walker, the guy with the nickname that isn’t even remotely hyperbolic. The guy is built like somebody took a regular bodybuilder into Photoshop, highlighted everything from the neck down and dragged the scale slider until the computer overheated. The guy who finished sixth at this very contest one year ago is now Mr. Olympia.
He beat 2024 champion Samson Dauda, defending champion and two time Olympia winner Derek Lunsford and 2026 Arnold Classic winner Andrew Jacked. Walker got the Sandow, $600,000 and the People’s Champion award. Dauda was second, Lunsford third, Andrew fourth and Tonio Burton fifth.
But the part I like isn’t that Nick won. It’s how close he came to not winning. This wasn’t Ronnie Coleman standing next to a lineup and everybody immediately wondering what time the buffet opened. The final score was Walker 18, Dauda 20, Lunsford 24. Just six points separated the first three guys. In prejudging, Lunsford was only one point behind Walker. Then Samson came on stronger in the finals and made a legitimate run at the whole thing. In other words, nobody got robbed. Nobody got steamrolled. No one was off. Three guys showed up capable of winning the Mr. Olympia and one of them had to. Nick did.
Bodybuilding has this wonderful habit of deciding a guy’s future before the guy gets there. Too blocky. Waist too wide. Structure isn’t pretty enough. Can’t beat the more aesthetic guys. He’s peaked. He was sixth last year. The judges have already told us what they think. Not true: The judges told us what they thought on the night. That’s bodybuilding.
Walker had already been third at the Olympia in 2022. Then he missed the 2023 and 2024 contests before returning in 2025 and landing in sixth. That’s a career trajectory that can screw with your head if you let it. Third, gone, gone, sixth. Meanwhile new monsters keep showing up and the old monsters don’t politely retire because you’re trying to make a comeback. Then this year Walker wins Tampa, shows up in Vegas and beats all of them.
What’s also interesting is what his win says about judging. Nick Walker is not Frank Zane. The Open Mr. Olympia is still the one place where unapologetic freakiness has a home. That’s not permission to have a refrigerator for a waist and call it mass though. Shape matters. Balance matters. Condition matters. Presentation matters. But at some point an Open Mr. Olympia should walk out and make normal people wonder if he’s the same species. Nick checks that box rather convincingly.
And the field made him earn every inch of it. Samson was two points away. Derek was six. Andrew Jacked, who had been unbeaten coming into Vegas after winning the Romania Pro, Arnold Classic and Arnold Classic UK, wound up fourth. Think about that lineup. Three Mr. Olympia champions in Walker, Dauda and Lunsford, and Andrew standing there looking like God decided to try bodybuilding. This wasn’t a weak year somebody backed into. Nick Walker beat the room.
However, this was not an apples to apples comparison. Walker’s and Dauda’s physiques are not comparable. So it comes down to judges picking what they like. And that is where we climb onto the razor’s edge. In my opinion, the bodybuilding ideal is not represented convincingly by Walker’s physique. A good number of us, including some of the judges, thought the same thing. But the primitive nature about this particular victory, is that it could easily have gone the other way, along with the articles and podcasts to support it, and the same argument would ensue.
At the end of the night, after all the coaching, blood and guts training, starving and whatever else modern bodybuilding has turned into, sometimes the sport still comes down to the oldest rule we’ve got: show up better than everybody else.
The consensus is that Nick did. And now Mr Olympia is a mutant. I wonder what Joe would think.