Arnold Sports Festival co-founder
Jim Lorimer, the colorful co-founder of the Arnold Classic, who also served as a national track coach, a mayor, a corporate executive and an FBI agent, died Thursday at age 96.
“I am devastated that I won’t sit with him again and hear his wisdom, or critique bodybuilders together, or just laugh and laugh,” said longtime friend and partner Arnold Schwarzenegger in an Instagram post. “Jim lives on in every member of his family, and he lives on in me. He’s one reason I would never call myself self-made.”
Born Oct. 7, 1926, in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Lorimer lived an eventful and active life. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Lorimer graduated from Ursinus College before receiving a law degree from Penn State and embarking on a career as a special agent with the FBI.
In the late 1950s, after several years in the FBI, Lorimer moved to Worthington to join Nationwide insurance company. In 1959, Lorimer, a lifelong sports fan, traveled to Philadelphia to watch an international gymnastics competition, where the Soviet Union women beat the U.S. women’s team.
Lorimer left the event convinced the U.S. women lacked only training to compete against the best in the world.
That passion led Lorimer to found the Ohio Track Club Girls Team. The success of the team, which won national championships, earned Lorimer a role as secretary and chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee for Women’s Track & Field.
“He had a real vision for women’s and girls’ sports,” said Linda Logan, the CEO and president of the Greater Columbus Sports Commission.
“He gave women and girls in Ohio the opportunity to compete at an international level. Generations of female athletes can thank him for that.”
His growing involvement in sports led Lorimer to chair the World Weightlifting Championship in Columbus in 1967, followed by promoting Mr. World and Mr. Olympia body-building contest in the city.
At the 1970 event, he invited the young Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger to Columbus,