The world's top body builders are certainly not vegan across the board...for example the actor/competing body builder who plays The Mountain on Game of Thrones consumes almost 2000 grams of animal fat daily[0].
Also no one should emulate top body builder diets unless they plan on working out like top body builders (e.g. 2-3 intensive training sessions a day).
You might be able to find a few vegan body builders but its certainly not the norm.
It would be seriously cool, though, if anyone here could leave a link as a citation to any article, tweet, FB page, whatevs that shows even one top body builder who is vegan as back up for the claim.
Here are some [1]. These are however not selected to be 'top' athletes, as far as I know.
I imagine that diet is irrelevant for athletic training, as long as it fulfills certain macro-nutrient requisites. Further, I image vegan athletes are only faced with the increased difficulty of finding and preparing quality sufficient food, compared to others with normative diets, due to lack of demand and meat centered cultures.
Finding an equivalent vegan alternative to chocolate pudding at <500g, 350kcal, 50g protein> for $2.5 [2] seems like a challenge. I'm sure that if they plan their diet, they can meet the same targets - whereas normative diets don't require you to plan anything really. You can just eat 2 of [2] and a chicken a day, and you're done (concerning only protein).
But then again, there are protein powders which balances it out, if we don't take price into account.
All in all, I think diet choices (assuming any choice to be a most healthy variant of chosen diet) mainly impacts long term health, and not short term goals such as muscle gains.
All comment had to say is some top body builders are vegan. Even some notable NFL players are/have been vegan.
Even then, they go out of their way to get enough protein - I think the person you replied to was trying to go for shock value but it was a pretty bad comment.
