A year ago, Samson Dauda walked onto the Olympia stage at around 282 pounds and finished fourth. On Saturday he weighed 310, won the finals round outright and missed the Sandow by two points.
The 2024 champion finished second to Nick Walker, 20 points to 18, in a system where the lowest total wins. “I’m proud of the show we brought this year,” he told Tony Doherty of NPC News Online after the finals.
The look that did not fit
Dauda’s 2025 is the key to his 2026. He arrived in Las Vegas last year as the defending champion, noticeably smaller, and dropped to fourth. He told Doherty exactly what went wrong.
For three years, he said, he had held himself back from adding muscle, because the message was always that he was big enough. Last year he went further and cut down in search of conditioning.
“We came down to 280, 282 and it was just a look that did not suit my frame at all,” he said.
The result stung at the time. The day after the 2025 show he posted that “sometimes doing everything right still doesn’t give you the result you hoped for,” as we reported then. By December he was talking about building up to 350 pounds in the off-season.
A year of growing
This time, Dauda said, he and his team stopped listening to outside advice. “Compared to last year, we did our own thing this year,” he said. “We didn’t let anybody tell us what we needed to do.”
The plan was to get the lost muscle back and build on top of it, and he said his body responded almost immediately. By the time he reached Las Vegas he was 310 pounds.
He also used the Europa Pro, which he won on September 13, as a dress rehearsal for the bigger body. “You have to have a test and not use the biggest showing of the year as your testing ground,” he said.
Friday versus Saturday
The scorecard shows where the two points went. Dauda was third after Friday’s prejudging with 15 points, behind Walker’s 8 and Derek Lunsford’s 9. On Saturday he posted a finals score of 5, which matched the best round score recorded all weekend. Our 2026 Mr. Olympia scorecard explainer breaks down how that added up to second place.
Dauda said the pattern was no surprise.
“No matter how good I come out on Friday, Saturday, 24 hours of drying out, you’re going to look even drier,” he said. “It’s always the case with me.”
Two friends on the top two steps
The man who beat him is a friend. Dauda said he and Walker had talked after the 2025 Olympia, when both left disappointed, and agreed it would not happen again.
“To have both of us stand there, you know, I couldn’t feel more prouder,” he said.
Walker returned the compliment in his own interview with Doherty. “That’s what you call a fighter,” he said of Dauda.
Sixth, third, first, fourth, second: Dauda’s Olympia arc
That is Dauda’s Olympia record since his debut in 2022, and he does not think he has found his ceiling yet. “I want to make sure that every year I am pushing to be a better version of myself every single time,” he said.
Every placing and score from the Men’s Open is in our 2026 Mr. Olympia bodybuilding results, and his full contest history is on his athlete page. Derek Lunsford, who finished third, explained his night in his own interview.
