Generation Iron 2, a film about professional body-builders, premiered last Friday and is well worth a look when it comes to wider release.

These are remarkable, extreme and sometimes tragic figures.

The film focuses on Kai Greene, a 41-year-old from Brooklyn who has endured the agony of three runners-up places at Mr Olympia, the bodybuilding contest that made a legend of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Greene, a thoughtful, softly-spoken man, says: “the world sees me as a 300 pound black guy with an eight-inch scar down his face, someone who would know nothing about feelings of vulnerability.”

Greene paints and draws, and says he no longer finds meaning in the pursuit of trophies. The exhaustion and the adulation alike seem to have made him numb.