The Founding Story: Mold in the Gold's Gym Daytona Sauna

August 2024: Thomas Bowman documented mold in the Gold's Gym Daytona Beach sauna, tested it, got sick, and filed with every agency that would take the complaint. None of them had a mandate to act. This is the full record.

In August 2024, Thomas Bowman Jr was a member of the Gold’s Gym at 1808 W. International Speedway Blvd, Suite 601, Daytona Beach, FL 32114. He kept getting a sore throat every time he used the men’s sauna. So he looked — really looked — at the bench he had been sitting on, and then he picked up a camera and a Mold Armor test kit.

What follows is his account, documented in his own five-part video series and the complaints he filed by hand, while sick, in the first days after he found it. Where a detail is his account rather than an official record, this page says so.

Daytona Beach has called itself the “World’s Most Famous Beach” for a century. The gym in this story carries the most famous name in fitness: Gold’s Gym, founded in 1965 in Venice, California — the original, the one every gym since is measured against. What that name came to in Daytona is the record on this page: a sauna left to grow mold for years, and a member who reported it, got sick, and was answered by no one. This site exists to make this the most famous gym story in the world — for what was found inside it, and for how it was handled.

The sauna

The men’s sauna sits inside a bathroom. Three construction facts drive everything else:

1. No floor drain. The room has nowhere for water — or sweat — to go.
2. The bench was nailed to the wall, with no access panel. There was no way to clean inside or underneath the bench without tearing it apart.
3. It was built that way in 2012. By August 2024 the space under that bench had gone roughly twelve years with no cleaning access at all.

On camera, Thomas showed mold all over and under the bench and on the ceiling of the bench enclosure. Another member told him on camera that he had personally reported it to the owner earlier — the owner had a board removed from the front face of the bench, looked inside, and did nothing.

What the tests found

Thomas swabbed the sauna on camera with a Mold Armor test kit. The results named in his video description:

• Chaetomium spp.
• Aspergillus spp.
• Nigrospora spp.

All three are recognized indoor, dampness-associated molds. Per Thomas’s account, a professional mold company also tested and found three to four harmful types — and the findings were discounted as “not enough mold to be dangerous.” He had, in his words, a bunch of tests done, was on antibiotics, and was too sick some days to function.

By his account, getting the right tests was its own fight. The first provider he saw was not a doctor at all, but a physician’s assistant, working under an older supervising doctor Thomas never met and who was never present, to his knowledge. He says the assistant knew nothing about mold exposure, ordered the wrong tests — medical-side tests that wasted his time — and would not cooperate when he questioned them. Thomas fired the practice, filed complaints against the assistant, and took his care to AdventHealth instead. He counts the episode as part of a Florida pattern of aging doctors effectively handing their practices over to assistants to run — his characterization, recorded here as his.

Per the gym’s position as documented at the time: Gold’s Gym refused to comment or test the sauna itself.

The eight-day trail: everyone he filed with, and what each one did

Thomas filed everywhere a citizen is told to file. This is the trail as he recapped it on camera in Part #3, eight days in:

That is the whole loop: the agency that registers gyms can’t inspect them, the health department has no sauna rules to enforce, code enforcement didn’t answer, and the company didn’t either.

One part of that trail deserves a second look, because it is easy to misread as people failing. Per Thomas’s account, officials did come out to that gym and look at the sauna — and once they saw that the problem was mold, there was nothing in their hands: no citation they could write for the mold, and none even for the dirtiness of the room. An unanswered complaint can be pinned on a person. A visit that ends in “we can’t cite this” cannot — it proves the failure is the law, not the officer. The people staffing those offices were never given a mandate: no standard to measure the room against, no test they could order, no closure they could impose. You cannot enforce a rule that was never written — and on mold in a gym sauna, in Florida as in nearly every state, nobody ever wrote it. There is no mold mandate. That sentence, not any one official, is what this site is aimed at. A press release covering the case later ran on ABNewswire under the headline “Community Pushes for Mold Safety Regulations in Florida’s Public Spaces,” and Thomas’s own consumer filing is on Ripoff Report.

The five videos

Thomas documented the case in real time on his SandosPromo channel. All five parts are embedded here — his footage, his tests, his filings.

What he did it with

Thomas has said it plainly, and it is part of the record of this site: in August 2024 he was deathly sick, and he did all of it by hand, without AI — the filming, the testing, the filings, the petition. This website is the same fight, continued with the tools he has now.

His conclusion from Part #5 is the thesis of this entire site. A dry sauna built with no access to clean under the bench and no floor drain will collect human sweat for years in a space nobody can reach — and in almost every jurisdiction in America, no agency has a mandate to inspect it, test it, or shut it down. That is what the petitions are for, and what Gym Watch keeps documenting, chain by chain.