Big Ramy: natty or not?

Likely enhanced Mamdouh Elssbiay — 2020 and 2021 Mr. Olympia, the biggest man of his era

Short answer. Verdict: likely enhanced. At the peak physique on this page, Big Ramy is 5'9" (175 cm) and 300 lbs (136.1 kg) at roughly 5% body fat. That works out to an FFMI of 42.5, against the ~25 mark cited as the natural ceiling.

No official record settles this. What follows is opinion and analysis based on public numbers — how we judge.

The numbers (estimated)

Note. Stage weights are era-reported figures; body-fat numbers are contest-shape estimates, and the verdict is opinion — Elssbiay has no failed test or admission on record. See the methodology page for how we judge.

The earliest dated image the archive holds is an AFP photo of him warming up before the Arnold Classic Brazil in Rio de Janeiro on 30 May 2015 — four years into his pro career and already enormous. No picture of the fisherman exists; his record starts, in images and numbers alike, after the transformation was over.

Mamdouh “Big Ramy” Elssbiay began his adult life as a fisherman in Egypt and found weight training in the late 2000s, after moving to Kuwait. He was about 25. Ten years later he was Mr. Olympia. The timeline in between is the least ambiguous on this site.

The two years that decide the page

Fitness Volt’s profile carries both ends of it: he weighed 200 lbs at his first show, and 286 lbs at the 2012 Amateur Olympia in Kuwait — the win that earned him his IFBB pro status. Even giving the first figure a generous 12% body fat and the second a stage-lean 5%, that is a move from about 176 lbs of lean tissue to about 272 lbs — roughly 96 lbs of lean mass — in about a year, at 5’9” (175 cm). The most generous natural ceiling our methodology allows a first-year genetic phenom is 15 lbs. This is six times that, in year two or three, and it took his FFMI from 26 (already past the drug-free ceiling) to 40.

Nothing after 2012 changes the verdict; it just extends it. He won the Mr. Olympia in 2020 and defended it in 2021, at a listed competition weight of 295–310 lbs — the table’s 2021 row uses 300 lbs (136 kg), the middle of that range — and in August 2022 he posted an off-season check-in captioned “18 weeks out at 336.6lbs/153kg”. Every row of the table computes an FFMI in the 40s. The record natural number in the Kouri dataset is 25.

What cuts the other way

Nothing in the arithmetic — but the honesty items are real. The genetics are extraordinary by any standard: response to training like his is rare even among enhanced professionals, which is the point of the genetics concession every open-class page here makes. His diet quotes are charmingly plain for a man his size: “When they thinking about the meal, I need to eat just the bread, bread and fish and rice” is the fisherman talking, and the 500-gram protein days are the Olympian. He has never claimed to be natural, never failed a test, and never been asked to take one that screens for anything anabolic: the IFBB Pro League’s open division does not test for the drugs that build this.

Verdict

Likely-enhanced — the rate-of-gain arithmetic is the loudest on this site, the destination FFMI is fifteen points past the natural ceiling, and the league he won twice does not check. It stays one step short of confirmed because Elssbiay himself has never said it and no record says it for him.