Orlando PRO 2023: Favourite Hassan Mostafa finishes second, the competition has an unexpected winner!

After the recent Empro Classic 2023, which was dominated by Michal Križánek in Alicante, Spain, the Jim Manion IFBB Professional League competitions have moved overseas again. This weekend was marked by the Orlando Pro, which took place in sunny Florida. There were 13 fighters, 11 of them from the United States. The remaining two were the hot contenders Hassan Mostafa from Egypt and Mohammad Alnsoor from Jordan. The course of the races and the final results are brought to you in this report.

Pre-competition predictions

As is usual with our reports, let's first see what the predictions of the foreign experts looked like on the day before the race. Despite the crowded American competition, the biggest favourite to win was the Egyptian giant Hassan Mostafa, who won last year's event. So far this year, he has only shown his skills at the Toronto Pro Supershow, where he finished second behind favourite Ian Vallier. Although Hassan looked well prepared according to his Instagram pre-contest photos, it's clear that he won't underestimate his opponents either. The second non-American participant in the race is a typical example. Mohammad is looking to tick off his debut start amongst the pros this season with this race, and would certainly like to follow up on his qualification at Olympia last year. Stanislas DeLongeaux, who is showing incredible progress with each competition and who would definitely like to see the most prestigious bodybuilding competition on the boards, is definitely going to be in the fight for medals. Between these three athletes, the battle for qualification for this year's Olympia was somehow expected from the beginning. So let's take a look at what the actual competition looked like.

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In the end, everything was completely different

To everyone's surprise, however, the course of the prejudging suggested that everything could have been completely different. The well-prepared Phil Clahar managed to squeeze in between the favoured Mostafa-DeLongeaux pairing and was in the middle of the comparison with Mostafa. While Clahar hasn't stood on the podium since 6th place at last year's Boston Pro, he had previously finished second behind Ian Vallier at the 2021 Tampa Pro, for example. However, he hasn't yet achieved the overall top spot in the pro league, and maybe that's why no one was predicting him to have much success. However, it was already clear after the prejudging that he was a force to be reckoned with this time, and in the end it came down to this giant's victory, much to everyone's surprise. A disappointed Hassan Mostafa finished second and Stanislas DeLongeaux had to settle for third place. Emanuel Alvarez took fourth and Chris Didomenico rounded out the top five. But either way, only Clahar can be satisfied, given the change in the qualifying system at Olympia, as he deservedly earned his qualifying ticket.

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