The 2021 Arnold Sports Festival is being postponed to September with exact dates incoming soon.
UPDATE (4/27/21): It has been officially confirmed that the final date for the Arnold Classic 2021 will be September 25, 2021. The event will only include the Arnold Classic and the Arnold Strongman events. The expo will not be held and is set to return in 2022.
The exact location of the event has not yet been revealed. Whether or not a live audience will be allowed will be determined by the hosting city’s guidelines. Full story on this update can be found here.
Original story follows:
Last year, the 2020 Arnold Sports Festival was one of the first serious competitions to get rescheduled due to the global coronavirus pandemic. Fans of the sport everywhere were devastated since the Arnold is one of the most well-attended conventions in bodybuilding, with almost 20,000 athletes and spectators gathering together to celebrate strength sports.
It was recently announced that the 2021 Arnold Sports Festival will be postponed from its typical date in early March to September of this year with the hope that deployment of a COVID-19 vaccine will allow spectators to attend.
Officials organizing the event suggested that by the time September approaches, enough people will be vaccinated that it will be safe to hold the event in its traditional, non-social distanced format. That’s cause for celebration, even if it’s sad that it means we now have to wait longer for the convention.
“We’ve been, for 32 years, the first weekend in March in Columbus, Ohio. Due to the fact that we need full assembly in the convention center, we just didn’t believe that the first or second quarter of this year we were going to be able to have that,” said Robert Larimer, President of the Arnold Sports Festival, in an exclusive interview with ABC 6.
It was also revealed in the interview that the convention hall which typically hosts the Arnold is currently in use by the city of Columbus as a coronavirus field hospital.
“We built a really great floor, and stage, the entire facilities, and nobody really got the opportunity to see what we built last year, so we are just going to bring the same thing forward, and hopefully everybody comes out and enjoys it.”
Well, that’s amazing news for fans who were disappointed that last year’s festival was unable to have spectators attend. Here’s hoping the 2021 Arnold is a remarkable success and that we can all get back to enjoying the sport we love!
*All images and media courtesy of Instagram.
