Ms Olympia 2014–2019: The Discontinuation, the Rising Phoenix, and What It Cost

Last reviewed: 17 April 2026.

What happened, in sequence

On 22 September 2014, Iris Kyle won her tenth Ms Olympia title at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas. Within weeks, NPC and IFBB Pro League president Jim Manion announced, as reported contemporaneously by NPC News Online and the broader trade press, that the Ms Olympia would not be held in 2015. The stated reasoning centred on declining commercial viability and changing audience preferences. The 2014 competition, which Kyle won, was framed in subsequent coverage as the end of an era rather than an interruption.

In 2015, Wings of Strength, the promotional company owned by Jake Wood, launched the Rising Phoenix World Championships. The event was sanctioned by the IFBB Pro League as a professional women’s bodybuilding contest and was funded, in public statements by Wood, to ensure the division’s top athletes had a stage. Rising Phoenix ran from 2015 through 2019 as the de facto apex event of professional women’s bodybuilding.

In February 2020, Jake Wood announced that Wings of Strength had acquired the Ms Olympia contract and that the Ms Olympia would return in 2020. Since then, Ms Olympia has run continuously under Wood’s promotional control.

That is the factual spine. The question this article examines is: what did those five years do to the sport’s record, and how should the Rising Phoenix era be treated in the historical ledger?

The closing act: Iris Kyle’s tenth

Iris Kyle won ten Ms Olympia titles between 2004 and 2014, with an unbroken run from 2006 to 2014 after Yaxeni Oriquen-Garcia’s 2005 win. Her tenth, in 2014, surpassed the record of nine that had been shared with Lenda Murray. Kyle was 40 years old. She announced her retirement from competition shortly afterward.

The narrative that crystallised in 2014 coverage treated Kyle’s tenth as both a personal peak and an event-level ending. Two things were happening at once: the most decorated Ms Olympia ever was walking away, and the event she had dominated was being shelved. In hindsight, those two facts compressed into a single story that was told as closure. It was closure for Kyle. For the event, it turned out to be a pause.

Five years of parallel industry

Between 2015 and 2019, Rising Phoenix was the premier professional women’s bodybuilding show. Its placement tables from that period were, by consensus of contemporaneous reporting, the closest the sport had to a world-championship record.

Three observations from the record:

• Helle Trevino and Margie Martin defined the era. Between them they accounted for four of five titles and every runner-up slot from 2015 through 2018.
• Alina Popa was a consistent top-three. She placed third in 2016, 2017, and 2018 — the kind of durability that in any other era would be a Ms Olympia case for the history books.
• Andrea Shaw’s 2019 title is the bridge. Shaw went on to win the reinstated Ms Olympia in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Her 2019 Rising Phoenix is, mechanically, the last professional apex title before the apex title changed names.

The Iron Score problem

SteelQueens’s Iron Score rankings weight career achievements across the sport’s apex events. The 2014–2020 discontinuity forces an editorial decision: does Rising Phoenix 2015–2019 count as continuous with Ms Olympia history, or as a parallel record?

Position A: Rising Phoenix is part of the Ms Olympia lineage. Under this view, Helle Trevino is a three-time world champion, Margie Martin is a one-time world champion with four runner-up finishes, and Andrea Shaw is a seven-time consecutive world champion counting her 2019 Rising Phoenix and 2020-2025 Olympias.

Position B: Rising Phoenix is a parallel record, not continuous. Under this view, the Ms Olympia lineage runs 1980 to 2014, pauses, and resumes in 2020. Rising Phoenix titles are real accomplishments under a different banner.

Position C: Treat each era on its own terms, weight them explicitly. Iron Score assigns Rising Phoenix titles a weight equal to the Ms Olympia on the reasoning that they were the sport’s apex event at the time, while flagging the era as discontinuous in the athlete profile display.

SteelQueens’s Iron Score adopts Position C. Rising Phoenix titles carry apex-event weight in the scoring; athlete profiles display the Rising Phoenix era as a distinct section labelled “Rising Phoenix Era, 2015–2019 (Ms Olympia not contested).” This is an editorial judgement. We document it explicitly on the methodology page.

The federation has not published a position on whether Rising Phoenix 2015–2019 results should be considered continuous with Ms Olympia history.

Jake Wood’s stated reasoning

Jake Wood’s public comments, across interviews with Generation Iron, BarBend, and podcast appearances documented in the trade press, have consistently framed Rising Phoenix as a preservation effort. He has described funding the event out of personal commitment to the division during a period when the sport’s institutional promoter had withdrawn the apex show. He has not, in comments we have catalogued, criticised the 2014 discontinuation decision; his framing has been additive rather than oppositional.

Wood’s 2020 acquisition of the Ms Olympia contract and subsequent rebranding of the women’s bodybuilding apex from Rising Phoenix to Ms Olympia is the cleanest piece of evidence that the two events occupied the same competitive slot in the sport’s ecology.

Documented governance context

The 2014 discontinuation took place inside an institutional structure that the Washington Post‘s December 2022 investigation would later describe as concentrated around a single executive. That reporting is the most thorough public record of how decisions in the NPC and IFBB Pro League pipeline are made. It establishes, on the public record, that the 2014 decision to discontinue Ms Olympia was taken inside a governance structure that athletes have publicly described as structurally opaque.

What it cost the sport

A five-year interruption in apex-title continuity. Historical comparisons across eras — always contested in bodybuilding — now require a footnote. Any list of Ms Olympia winners published in the next fifty years will carry a gap from 2015 to 2019.

A narrative compression that may have cost athletes. Because Iris Kyle’s 2014 retirement and the event’s discontinuation were told as one story, the athletes who carried the division through 2015–2019 entered the record as secondary figures. Helle Trevino’s three world titles, Margie Martin’s 2016 world title, and Alina Popa’s three consecutive third-place finishes would, in a continuous ledger, sit in the upper echelon of the division’s all-time record.

An unresolved succession question that the sport has not addressed. The IFBB Pro League has not published a position on how the Rising Phoenix era should be counted. Neither has Wings of Strength, despite promoting both events. The absence of an institutional decision leaves the question to trade press, fan communities, and reference sites such as this one.

What SteelQueens will do

We maintain the full placement record of Rising Phoenix 2015–2019 on the competition archive. We display Rising Phoenix titles in athlete profiles with explicit era labelling. Iron Score treats them as apex-event wins. Readers who disagree with that weighting can reconstruct alternative rankings from the same data: the raw placements are all public.

Methodology

Placement tables were compiled from Wings of Strength official releases, Fitness Volt and NPC News Online contemporaneous coverage, and cross-checked against Flex magazine archives where available. Iron Score weighting methodology, including our Position C treatment of Rising Phoenix, is documented at /methodology/.

This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the SteelQueens editorial team.