There are 27 women — more than any other division, men’s or women’s — at the Olympia. If you’ve only seen these women on Instagram, the most remarkable thing about seeing them onstage is how small they are in real life. Kaltwasser is one of the tallest at 5-foot-5. Onstage they all wear clear, sky-high heels.

Yeshaira Robles comes out toward the end in a pink suit with gold-highlighted hair. She looks ripped and gorgeous, of course, but maybe a teensy bit bored. Her gaze doesn’t smolder so much as say, “Just give me the trophy and let’s get this over with.”

Because she’s the defending champion, Kaltwasser goes last. She looks poised and confident. Her legs stay steady, even when she crosses them for the back pose. There’s something refreshing about her routine; she doesn’t wink or pout at the judges but keeps her smile wide. The judges bring six women to the center, including Kaltwasser and Robles. This is first callouts, and it means these are the six women in the running for a top spot. The judges move the women around to compare them. Robles gets moved to the far end — that means she’s out of the running for first. Kaltwasser gets moved to the middle. They move a first-time Olympia competitor named Janet Layug next to her. The thing everyone seems to know about Layug is that she won a Hooters pageant of some kind earlier this year. She’s stunning in a Victoria’s Secret runway model-type way, long and lean with a face that one webcast commentator described as “a pillar of beauty.” She poses with a winner’s cockiness, smiling just enough to show she’s having a good time. Here, next to Layug, Kaltwasser looks almost (almost) stocky, her smile like Miss Ohio’s at the state fair.

“[Layug] had the stage presence that I didn’t have,” Kaltwasser tells me later. Based on prejudging, Kaltwasser thinks she has a spot in the top two, but second won’t make history. She spends the afternoon glued to her iPhone, reading comments and predictions on social media. All the events are live-streaming, and people are weighing in from around the world. A popular bodybuilding Twitter account @musclephone thinks Kaltwasser “won it from the back,” but will the judges agree?

Kaltwasser’s manager is J.M. Manion, owner of the Fitness Management Group and a man whose influence in the bodybuilding world is both obvious and hard to quantify. His father, Jim Manion, is president of the IFBB Pro League in the U.S. The younger Manion manages not only Kaltwasser but also Robles, Layug, and every other top contender at the Bikini Olympia. Every Bikini Olympia winner since the division began was managed by Manion at some point in her career. It seems like an unspoken rule that no one has a shot at the top spot until they sign with FMG.

Manion’s email address is also registered as the owner of two active porn sites devoted to IFBB competitors. One, called “Lacey D.” (tagline: “For All Of You To See”), features Lacey DeLuca, an FMG client who competed alongside Kaltwasser on the Bikini Olympia stage. According to DeLuca, 26, Manion photographed her for his porn site in 2012, soon after she became a bikini pro. “Everything that J.M. does with me like that is very classy,” she says. She adds that, as a manager, Manion “always steers us in the right direction,” telling them which shows to enter and which to avoid. DeLuca declined to comment on whether she's seen any profits from "Lacey D." Manion did not respond for comment about the relationship between his bikini competition endeavors and his pornographic ones.

The bikini division is a blatant attempt to revive the sex appeal that women’s bodybuilding had in its early days, before a steroid-fueled arms race turned the division into a carnival show of the impossibly huge. Back then, most female bodybuilders looked like the women in the bikini division today. For evidence, look no further than 1985’s Pumping Iron II: The Women, hornball sequel to Pumping Iron, the film that helped make Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. For over an hour and a half, the camera ogles them up and down: in spandex at the gym, in bikinis by the pool, naked in a communal shower, all set to a synth-pop soundtrack. “Well I’ve always considered myself a powder puff, but I consider myself a really strong powder puff,” says one woman who looks like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. “Got to get that fat off,” says a male trainer to another competitor. He pushes her through some T-bar rows, then they make out.

Iris Kyle, the 10-time Ms. Olympia whose quads are thicker than most horses’, is not going to get a GQ spread anytime soon, but Ashley Kaltwasser very well could. (Standing behind her at the podium, the male emcee jokes about having “the best seat in the house.”) Kaltwasser got breast implants in 2011, not long after she started competing. Most women at the pro level do, because, as Kaltwasser put it, “when your body fat gets down, your boobs go.” Kaltwasser wanted to stay athletic-looking and she was aware that the judges don’t go for the “bimbo look,” so she went for a sensible D-cup. But she also says she’s not interested in being a sex symbol for guys. “What are boys? I’m all about the Olympia,” she jokes. The posing, the getup, the hour-long makeup routine: She treats it as seriously as the training and the diet. She treats it all like a job, because it is. When I ask if there's a hookup scene at the Olympia, she gives me a strange look. “Probably [among] the fans,” she says.