The obituaries will call him a fitness icon, a pioneer of group exercise, a man who turned aerobics into a global phenomenon. But let us not be seduced by the soft-focus language of our sentimental age. Les Mills, who has died at 91, was something far rarer: a living monument to a vanished world of sporting excellence, a world where discipline, not participation trophies, forged champions.
His passing is not merely the loss of a man, but the closing of a chapter in the long, slow decline of the West. Mills, a New Zealander, built his empire on a foundation of British-inspired rigour. As a four-time world champion in athletics, he embodied the amateur ideal, that curious blend of stoicism and self-improvement that once defined the British public school spirit.
He then transmuted this ethos into Les Mills International, a fitness brand that, at its zenith, seemed to promise a return to Spartan virtue for the flabby masses. But we must ask ourselves: what has become of that legacy? Today, his daughter Diana and son Phillip run a company that sells choreographed classes to a world that has forgotten the very concept of exertion.
We live in an age of intellectual and physical decadence, where 'wellness' has replaced fitness, and 'self-care' has supplanted discipline. The rise of Les Mills was a last gasp of the Victorian-era belief in muscular Christianity, the notion that a sound body houses a sound mind. Now we have influencers hawking green powders and cryotherapy, as if the path to virtue can be purchased on Amazon.
The contrast with Mills's own era is instructive. He competed in the 1950s, a time when New Zealand still considered itself a cultural outpost of Britain. His World Championships in 1958 and 1962 were won against a backdrop of post-war austerity, where success came from endless laps of a cinder track, not from a carefully curated Instagram feed.
His famous 'pump' classes, with their military precision and commanding instructors, were a direct inheritance from the British army's physical training manuals. It is no coincidence that the company's decline into corporate blandness mirrors the broader collapse of British cultural influence. We have traded the white cliffs of Dover for a globalised swamp of mediocrity.
The very idea of national identity, which gave Mills his purpose, is now considered a prejudice. His funeral will be a lavish affair, no doubt, with tributes from fitness influencers and promises to carry on his 'legacy'. But let us not kid ourselves.
The world that made Les Mills possible, a world of stiff upper lips and cold showers and the belief that suffering builds character, is dead. We are left with the hollowed-out shell of his brand, a temple to a god we no longer believe in. In his honour, perhaps we should do something truly radical: switch off the screens, step away from the Peloton, and run until our lungs burn.
Not for a hashtag. Not for an Instagram story. But because, as Mills knew, it is the only thing that makes us human.
