Shaun Davis, the British bodybuilder who won Mr. Universe in 1996, died at 57.
A cause of death was not announced.
“I’m absolutely devastated,” his friend Kuldeep Bhardwaj posted on Facebook last Friday. “Rest in Peace my friend you was a true inspiration right from the day I met you at school, through your amazing bodybuilding years and after. Your smile and laughter will be missed.”
He signed with a pro soccer team when he was younger, but a broken leg cut his career short.
“Some of my friends were going to the gym and working out and friends locally were looking good so I thought I’d get into bodybuilding,” Davis recalled in a 2018 interview.
His “Dinosaur” nickname came from a friend at the gym who said Davis “had a great big body and a little brain.”
“It stuck so everybody started calling me the Dinosaur,” Davis recalled.
Davis also earned the title of Mr. Britain and Mr. Europe before kidney issues forced him to retire,” Metro reported.
“I look at people’s routines these days, I look at people say, ‘We train hard.’ They don’t know, honestly. These people, I can tell, in their eyes, they haven’t got the will, the desire, the wanting to win,” he said in 2018.
He received dialysis for three years before undergoing a transplant in 2009.
“The ups and downs were unbelievable,” he said. “You get a phone call one day and they say, ‘Shaun do you want a kidney … it’s like winning the lottery.”
Davis admitted it took getting used to life after competitive bodybuilding.
“I’d gone from being a pro bodybuilder, traveling the world every week, going to seminars, guests spots … to being nobody,” he said. “When you lose your identity the phone stops. Everybody wanted to see me as the 300 and odd pound freak bouncing up and down the stage and throwing his arms up and frightening people.”
Davis added, “It took me time to come to deal with that. I didn’t want to go anywhere when I started losing weight. I just felt that it was all gone. It wasn’t me.”
He is survived by his partner Helen Burrows and their daughter Harley.