So the man who turned lifting things up and putting them down into a global religion has finally laid down his own barbell. Les Mills, four-time Olympian and founder of the fitness empire that bears his name, is dead at 91. The obituaries will gush about his medals, his BODYJAM, his 'BODYPUMP'. I shall not. I shall instead note that his death marks the quiet close of a peculiar chapter in British life: the moment when the pursuit of physical excellence mutated into a mass-produced, branded, endlessly marketable commodity.
Mills was a throwback, you see. He competed in the 1950s and 60s, when an Olympian was still an amateur, a gentleman, a man who threw the discus for King and Country before retiring to a respectable job in insurance or teaching. He was a physical educator in the old sense: a man who believed that strong bodies built strong characters. And then, in the 1970s, he did something very modern. He took that belief, packaged it in a leotard, added a soundtrack, and sold it to the world. The result was Les Mills International, a franchise that now blasts its choreographed grunting into 17,000 gyms across 100 countries. It is a remarkable achievement. It is also, in many ways, the death of something precious.
Consider the contrast. Mills the athlete trained in rain-soaked fields, alone with his implements. Mills the entrepreneur created a system where a housewife in Swindon can pound a plastic bar to 'Eye of the Tiger' under a disco ball, convinced she is channeling the same spirit. She is not. She is participating in what the Germans call 'Eichhörnchenrad' - the hamster wheel. A loop of controlled, risk-free exertion designed to extract money and sweat without ever touching the soul. The empire Mills built is the IKEA of fitness: functional, democratic, utterly soulless.
Do not mistake me. I do not begrudge the man his fortune. But I see in his story a parable of our age. We have replaced the jagged, lonely struggle of genuine athleticism - the discus throw that might fail, the race that might break you - with a smooth, safe, branded experience. The gold standard of British health, they call it. I call it the triumph of comfort over character. Mills was the last of the pioneers, the man who stood at the junction between the ancient world of physical honour and the modern world of physical consumerism. He walked both paths, but his empire only serves one.
So let us raise a dumbbell - a standard, rubber-coated, Les Mills-approved dumbbell - and salute the man. He was a giant. But the gym he built is a gilded cage. And we are all inside it, pumping iron and pretending we are free.
