On Sunday night in Bucharest, Anastasia Korableva won the women’s bodybuilding at the 2026 Romania Muscle Fest Pro for the third year running. She beat Paula Ranta, fourth at the Ms. Olympia six weeks ago, by one point: 4 to 5 on the federation’s scorecard.
It was the first time the two had stood in the same lineup. One arrived billed as the most muscular woman in the world, the other as the most shredded. The judges split, and the bigger woman won.
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The scorecard
Eight women competed. The IFBB Pro League’s rules for women’s bodybuilding say: “The Judging is valued at 100%.” The finals only change a score if the head judge calls a scored “confirmation round”. In Bucharest the finals column stayed empty, so the result was settled in prejudging.
| Place | Athlete | Country | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anastasia Korableva | Romania | 4 |
| 2 | Paula Ranta | Finland | 5 |
| 3 | Eleonore Vatin | UK | 9 |
| 4 | Emilia Dimitrova-Balkova | Bulgaria | 12 |
| 5 | Lisa Smith | UK | 15 |
| 6 | Michaela Baumer-Zink | Germany | 18 |
| 7 | Uta Kohler-Spitzbart | Germany | 21 |
| 8 | Jiajia Shi | China | 24 |
Source: IFBB Pro League scorecard, read 9 Nov 2026. FitnessVolt has the same order and scores.
The sheet’s own arithmetic shows how close it was. From third place down, every score is exactly three times the placing: three judges’ placings count. A perfect score is therefore 3, every counted judge putting her first. That is what Korableva scored at her last two wins, the 2025 Romania Muscle Fest and the 2026 Alina Popa Classic.
This time she scored 4. Three placings that add up to 4 can only be first, first and second. Ranta’s 5 is either first, second, second or first, first, third. Either way, at least one judge whose score counted had Paula Ranta first.
The show’s page adds something no scorecard has: the podium chance our model gave each woman before the show, worked out only from the placings she had on record, with the model’s test results on the methodology page.
Korableva’s cheque in the photographer’s set reads $2,500. The win qualifies her for the 2027 Ms. Olympia: she is already on the IFBB Pro League’s list of qualified athletes.
Most muscular against most shredded
The build-up was the media’s, not the athletes’. On 28 October our partner Hardcore FBB posted a short titled “Paula Vs Anastasia Women’s Bodybuilding most awaited battle.” Three days later the Female Bodybuilding Channel published a 39-minute interview with Ranta under the headline “THE MOST SHREDDED WOMAN in the world”. Korableva had already been given her own title in August: Full Access called its film of her Alina Popa Classic win “THE WORLDS MOST MUSCULAR WOMAN”.
The promoter put the stakes in one line on 7 weeks out: “New athletes. New ambitions. One Olympia 2027 qualification on the line.”
Neither athlete said a word about the other in public that we could find. What there is on record is what each one said about herself.
Ranta came up through the divisions that reward lines and hardness. On our record she won pro shows in Figure (2022) and Women’s Physique (2025 and 2026), then won the Tampa Pro on 1 August in her first bodybuilding show, and finished fourth at the Ms. Olympia on 26 September. Her captions sell conditioning. Five days before the Olympia she posted her rear view with her coach, Ville Rekola, and three words: “SHOW YOUR SHREDDEDNESS.” RX Muscle’s caption on the same clip: “absolutely LIGHTS OUT!”
Korableva has only ever competed in bodybuilding. Bucharest was her seventh Romania Muscle Fest in seven years: 5th in 2020, 4th in 2021, 7th in 2022, 2nd in 2023, then three wins (NPC News Online archive). Her captions sell size. In July, five weeks before the Alina Popa Classic:
“For those of you complaining about size and aesthetics — let me remind you: being ‘aesthetic’ without size is just another way of saying you’re small 😌😁 Don’t thank me.”
Side by side
The Female Bodybuilding Channel cut the two of them on stage together into four minutes: Korableva in green with number 46, Ranta beside her with 47. It is the closest thing to sitting in the judges’ row.
How they compare on paper:
| Anastasia Korableva | Paula Ranta | |
|---|---|---|
| Country on the scorecard | Romania | Finland |
| Pro shows in women’s bodybuilding | 9, from 2020 | 3, from August 2026 |
| Wins in women’s bodybuilding | 4 | 1 |
| Divisions before bodybuilding | none | Figure (2021–23), Women’s Physique (2024–26) |
| 2026 Ms. Olympia | not on stage (visa) | 4th |
| 2026 Romania Muscle Fest | 1st, score 4 | 2nd, score 5 |
| 2027 Ms. Olympia | qualified | not yet |
Records: NPC News Online contest archive and the scorecards above. Every placing of both is on their profiles, with its source, and the head-to-head page keeps the record between them.
Their prep posts show the same contrast. Six weeks out from her August show, Korableva filmed herself flexing in the mirror at home. Seven days out from the Olympia, Ranta filmed a front lat spread in the gym.
Seven poses
Women’s bodybuilding has seven mandatory poses, in this order: front double biceps, front lat spread, side chest, back double biceps, back lat spread, side triceps, abdominals and thighs. In prejudging each woman performs all seven alone, in 60 seconds or less, before the callouts compare them in groups. The men’s list has an eighth pose, the most muscular. The women’s list does not.
Our partner filmed Korableva’s 60 seconds at last year’s Romania Muscle Fest; the video at the end of this section opens on them. First, the poses she shows most herself.
Front double biceps
The first pose sets the frame for everything after it. Both arms come up, fists at head height. The judges read the peak of the biceps, the cap of the shoulders, the spread of the chest and, below a waist that has to stay tight, the front of the legs.
It is also the pose Korableva posts most. In her living-room clip five weeks out the arms and shoulders are one block from elbow to elbow. Her quads, in a wide stance, show the teardrop above the knee and the sweep on the outside as two separate shapes. That separation, more than the size, is what the judges are scoring.
Side chest
Turned side-on, the athlete shows the thickness that the front poses hide: the depth of the chest, the arm pressed against it, and the leg nearest the judges bent with the heel lifted, so the calf and the hamstring stand out.
That is the stance in her gym clip of 21 September: front leg bent, heel up. The caption is not about the pose. It is about her: “Once upon a time, there was this girl born in a small town of 10,000 people… nobody ever told that girl she couldn’t do something.”
Back double biceps
The back double biceps is where a heavy back wins or loses a lineup. Arms up again, now from behind: the judges look at the width of the lats, the detail of the traps and the lower back, and the hamstrings and calves underneath.
Korableva posted hers in September next to the same pose from the year she earned her pro card. Her caption: “Progress doesn’t happen overnight… It’s just the same routine every day of my life… Same pose but completely different level.”
The arms
The arms are not a pose of their own, but they are in five of the seven. They are also the part of her that the internet argues about most. She posted this close-up of a flexed biceps two days after the back pose, and answered the argument in the caption:
“Apparently this is ‘too much.’ Funny because I’m just getting started. This isn’t even my final form. If five seconds of bicep already offends you, you’re not gonna survive what’s coming. Watch me anyway😌”
By Sunday the clip had more than 3,300 likes.
Lat spreads, side triceps, abdominals and thighs
The other four poses complete the picture. The front lat spread shows how wide the back is from the front, with the hands on the waist. The back lat spread shows the same width from behind. The side triceps shows the back of the arm, with the hands locked behind the body. The abdominals and thighs, hands behind the head, is the one place where the waist has nowhere to hide.
The video above starts at her 60 seconds of individual posing in 2025, the show she won with a perfect score. Hardcore FBB’s chapters continue into the callouts at 5:54 and her final routine at 13:06.
“Too much”: what the result started
There was no war, at least not in public. Neither woman said a word about the other, and no outlet has questioned the result. The argument happened underneath the videos, and it split almost exactly the way the judges did: one side counted muscle, the other counted shape.
Under the Female Bodybuilding Channel’s side-by-side video, the case for Korableva:
“The only area where Paula was superior was lower body definition from the back. Everywhere else Anastasia overpowered her, in some cases massively, she even had superior abdominal clarity.” (YouTube comment)
And the case for Ranta, under the same video:
“Anastasia is enormous but Paula is streets ahead as far as overall shape, proportion, and symmetry is concerned. She is on a path to dominate WBB in the near future.” (YouTube comment)
“Muscle size is greater on Anastasia and her conditioning is just as good as Paula’s, but her physique is less aesthetically pleasing.” (YouTube comment)
Others were surprised by Ranta herself: “I thought Paula would look small next to Anastasia but not all… she added some nice size in just a few months” (comment). One line summed up the evening: “The Olympia face off we were deprived of.”
The size argument is older than Sunday
It started in August. In the week after her Alina Popa Classic win a reel of hers passed six million views, according to the Brazilian paper Correio 24horas which wrote that her look “divided opinions”. Under the recaps the criticism was blunt: her physique “will hurt the division and turn people away” (comment); “She will never win the Ms Olympia judges just wont buy her as huge as she is” (comment). The defence came from the same places. A post on X with 24,000 views: “this incredibly hardworking woman, Anastasia Korableva, is being mocked worldwide simply for doing what she loves… The problem isn’t her—it’s you” (X). And under Sunday’s video, the argument at the heart of the division:
“You can’t demand that women become world class bodybuilders and then also demand they remain feminine.” (YouTube comment)
The written standard is on that commenter’s side. The NPC’s rules for the division ask judges for “a balance of size, symmetry, and muscularity”, and the only rule that scores muscle down, “Excessive muscularity should be scored down”, belongs to Women’s Physique. We set that out in September in A division for one woman?.
Much of the louder noise is not about the judging at all. It is ridicule of her face, her hair and her dancing, mostly under videos made for men’s bodybuilding audiences. We do not repeat it. She answered it herself in September, in the caption of the side-on clip above: “your words are about you, not about me. I already know exactly who I am.”
“Eastern Europe awards mass”
The one criticism of the judges themselves predates Sunday too. After the Alina Popa Classic a commenter wrote: “Gotta remember eastern europe awards mass more then conditioning.” Hardcore FBB answered that the head judge there had been the Olympia judge Terrick El Guindy, “so I would expect him to follow the same judging criteria as in the US”. The federation’s page for Sunday’s show lists El Guindy again, without saying what his role was. Nobody we found has said the result was fixed.
Ranta’s side
Her camp had made the stakes plain. On her YouTube channel in October: “When we compete, we always compete to win… anything other than winning can feel like a disappointment” (comment). And the Female Bodybuilding Channel, explaining why she chose Bucharest, wrote that “trying to beat Korableva sets a huge statement” (comment). She came within one point of making it.
How big is all this, honestly? By Sunday night the side-by-side video had about 4,000 views and 25 comments. It is a split in a small, loud room, and the scorecard records the same split: 4 to 5. Which side are you on?
Your verdict · 2026 Romania Muscle Fest Pro
2026 Romania Muscle Fest Pro: did the judges get the Women's Bodybuilding right?
Anastasia Korableva won the Women's Bodybuilding at the 2026 Romania Muscle Fest Pro; Paula Ranta was second. Who had the better physique on the day?
Official 1. Anastasia Korableva · 2. Paula Ranta · source
What comes next
Korableva has qualified for the Ms. Olympia three years in a row and has not stood on its stage. She told SteelQueens why in September: “I haven’t made it to the Olympia for years because of visa issues and the political situation in the world. Not for some mysterious reason.” The 2027 Olympia is her next chance.
Ranta is not qualified yet. The 2027 qualification rules for women’s bodybuilding have no points table: an athlete qualifies by finishing in the top three of the 2026 Olympia or of the Rising Phoenix, or by winning an open pro show before 12 September 2027. A second place earns nothing. She was fourth at the Olympia and second here, so she needs a win.
On Sunday the distance between them was one judge’s placing. In 2027 it could be settled on a bigger stage, if both of them get there.
Also on the stage
- Eleonore Vatin (UK) took third with 9.
- Michaela Baumer-Zink (Germany), who earned her pro card in Women’s Physique in April (her story), finished sixth in her first bodybuilding show on our record.
- Anatole Kutischev, the subject of our Dossier #001, won women’s bodybuilding at the amateur show the day before, according to the Female Bodybuilding Channel.
- The other women’s divisions went to Julia Cabarcos (Women’s Physique), Beatriz Almeida (Figure), Leonida Ciobu (Wellness), Viktoria Csicsayova (Bikini) and Ana Alexandra Petreanu (Fit Model). The full results are on the show’s page.
Sources
- Result and scores: IFBB Pro League, 2026 Romania Muscle Fest Pro (read 9 Nov 2026); FitnessVolt
- Earlier scorecards: 2025 Romania Muscle Fest, 2026 Alina Popa Classic
- Rules: IFBB Pro League pro rules; 2027 Olympia qualification system; 2027 qualified athletes
- Career records: NPC News Online, Korableva, Ranta
- Event: Wings of Strength; the promoter’s post of 18 Sep 2026
- Photographs: @moriauphoto for Wings of Strength
- Video: Female Bodybuilding Channel, Paula vs Anastasia, Ranta interview, Korableva wins, Kutischev; Hardcore FBB Media, most awaited battle, 2025 full show; Full Access, THE WORLDS MOST MUSCULAR WOMAN
- In their own words: Korableva on Instagram, 20 Jul, 22 Jul, 25 Jul, 16 Sep, 18 Sep, 21 Sep; message to SteelQueens, 25 Sep 2026. Ranta on Instagram, 18 Sep, 21 Sep; RX Muscle, 21 Sep
