....are not that lowest of life forms, conservative Republicans.



From The Times
August 22, 2008
Sex and the Olympic city

Tomorrow night thousands of young men and women with the most fit, toned
bodies in the world will mingle for the last time before they fly home.
What might they get up to?

I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and
housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the
duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My
answer is always the same: too right it is. I played my first Games in
Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks
than in the rest of my life up to that point. That is to say twice,
which may not sound a lot, but for a 21-year-old undergraduate with
crooked teeth, it was a minor miracle.

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it
was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses - there to assist the
athletes - in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were
the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then
there were the female athletes - literally thousands of them -
strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in
Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and
unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world:
muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in
a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I
did pass out - in a place like that how was one to tell the difference
between dreamland and reality?

It was not just the guys. The women, too, seemed in thrall to their
hormones, throwing around daring glances and dynamite smiles like
confetti. No meal or coffee break was complete without a breathless
conversation with a lithe long jumper from Cuba or an Amazonian
badminton player from Sweden, the mutual longing so evident it was
almost comical. It was an effort of will to keep everything in check
until competition had finished. But, once we were eliminated from our
respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers.
There may have been a fair amount of gay sex going on, too - but given
the notorious homophobia in sport it was rather more covert.

This sex fest was not limited to Barcelona: the same thing happened in
Sydney in 2000, my second Olympics as an athlete, and is happening right
here in Beijing, where this time I'm a commentator. I spoke to an Aussie
table tennis player this week to check out the village vibe and he
launched into the breathless patter common to any Olympic debutant: “It
is unbelievable in there; everyone is totally crazy once they are out of
their competitions. God knows what it is going to be like this weekend.
It is like a world within a world.” A British runner (anonymous again:
athletes are not supposed to talk to journalists unaccompanied by a PR
type, least of all about sex) said: “The swimmers finished earlier in
the week and it was like there was an eruption.”

Ah yes, the swimmers. For some reason the International Olympic
Committee insists on bunching the swimming events towards the beginning
of the Games with the inevitable consequence that the aquatics folk get
going earlier - sexually I mean - than everyone else. So much so that,
at the outset of the Sydney Olympics, Jonathan Edwards, a Christian and
triple jumper extraordinaire, caused a ripple by telling them publicly
to keep a lid on it. Edwards was simply concerned about getting woken up
by creaking floorboards, but given his biblical credentials, it became a
story about morality. Not that his intervention made a blind bit of
difference. There is a famous story from Seoul in 1988 that there were
so many used condoms on the roof terrace of the British team's
residential block the night after the swimming concluded that the
British Olympic Association sent out an edict banning outdoor sex. Here
in Beijing, organisers have realised that such prohibitions are about as
useful as banning breathing and have, instead, handed out thousands of
free condoms to the athletes. If you can't stop 'em, at least make it safe.

Which all begs a question, or possibly many questions. First, and most
importantly, how can one get access to the village? The bad news is that
you can't, unless, of course, you happen to be an athlete with the
relevant accreditation. But secondly, where does this furnace of sexual
energy come from? Or, to put it another way, why do sportsmen and women
have such explosive libidos? I am not implying, for one moment, that
every athlete in Beijing is at it. Just that 99 per cent of them are.

Before we get to that, however, it is worth noting an intriguing
dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling. The chaps
who win gold medals - even those as geeky as Michael Phelps - are the
principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something
about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy -
smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done
the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not
merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.

But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways.
Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes
with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It
is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something
downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and
incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider
society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female
success is sexually ambiguous. I do not condone this phenomenon, merely
note it. Not all athletes are finely tuned specimens of perfect physical
health, of course. A fair number are smokers, not prepared to give up
despite the nagging of coaches and physiologists. At Barcelona, there
was an area where the puffers would congregate near the transport mall.
At the table tennis events in Beijing, a male player from Serbia and
another from Greece have often been out catching a drag during breaks in
play.

But let us get back to all the sex going down in the village. One
possible explanation centres on the fact that Olympic athletes have to
display an unnatural (and, it has to be said, wholly unhealthy) level of
self-discipline in the build-up to big competitions. How else is this
going to manifest itself than with a volcanic release of pent-up
hedonism? It is a common sight to see recently knocked-out athletes
gorging on Magnums and McDonald's, swilling alcohol and, of course,
shagging like crazy. Sometimes all three at the same time. Yet this can
be only a part of the explanation because most of the athletes I know
are as up for it before and during competition as they are in the
immediate aftermath. It is as if sportsmen and women have a higher base
level of sexual energy. But why? Can it be that one of the underlying
drivers of sporting greatness is also the very thing that produces an
overactive sex drive?

If so, you can bet your Olympic accreditation that testosterone is
implicated. Testosterone is the hormone responsible for many of the
differences between the sexes and is also a key physiological driver of
aggression, competitiveness and virility. This is particularly so with
regard to women. The dual effect of testosterone on female sporting
performance and sexuality was demonstrated - somewhat sinisterly -
during the state-sponsored doping programme in East Germany. An average
teenage girl produces around half a milligram of testosterone per day.
In the mid-1980s German female athletes were doped with around 30
milligrams of androgenic steroids per day. The effect on sporting
performance was breathtaking - East German women dominated the world in
swimming and athletics - but it also produced libidos (according to the
testimony of the athletes themselves) that spiraled out of control.

This is not to say that the athletes in the village are all on steroids,
or that elevated levels of testosterone inevitably lead to lots of sex.
It is merely to say that, at a population level, higher naturally
occurring levels of testosterone in both genders would provide a
powerful explanation for the combination of sporting prowess and sexual
potency.

I also think it is significant that, for most athletes, the village is
thousands of miles from home. The old “what goes on tour stays on tour”
mantra is still alive and kicking, not just in sport but beyond. There
is something deepseated in humanity that leads us to play by different
rules whenever we leave town, a phenomenon that has caused instances of
terrible inhumanity. When it comes to sex, it simply means that those in
relationships no longer recognise, or at least ignore, the boundaries of
fidelity and honesty that underpin human monogamy. Philosophers call it
moral relativism; the rest of us call it hypocrisy.

There is also a Darwinian component to this. Scientists have measured,
for example, how male fertility varies with distance from one's habitual
partner. And guess what? According to a report in the journal
Personality and Individual Differences, a man's sperm count doubles when
he spends a lot of time on the road - up from 389 million sperm per
ejaculate to 712 million. Which, I am sure you will agree, is a lot of
extra sperm.

I suggest that it is the coming together (if you will forgive the
expression) of these factors that creates such an explosive sexual
cocktail within the security-controlled perimeter of the Olympic
village. Not that this is a bad thing. I have always regarded sexual
promiscuity - for a single person at least - as a basic human right,
even if it is no panacea for happiness or, indeed, anything else. Of
course, many athletes will abstain, others may even disapprove. Only one
thing is certain: they will never again enter a place quite like the
Olympic village. Not, at least, until London 2012.

Olympic romances

Roger Federer and Miroslava Vavrinec: Roger and Miroslava (originally
from Slovakia) met at the 2000 Sydney Olympics where they both competed
for Switzerland. A year later Vavrinec retired due to a foot injury and
since has devotedly supported her man.

Matt Emmons and Katerina (Katy) Kurkova: Shooting stars Katy (Czech) and
Matt (US) met in Athens 2004. She consoled him after he fired at the
wrong target in his final shot which dropped him from 1st to 8th place.
The chemistry was instant and they married in 2007.

Derek Redmond and Sharron Davies: The British swimmer Sharron Davies and
athlete Derek Redmond met at the Barcelona Olympics (1992). In 1994 they
married and had two children. They divorced in 2000.

Alyson Annan and Carole Thate: Two great international hockey players
Alyson Annan (Australia) and Carole Thate (Netherlands) met in Sydney
(2000). Their friendship led to a civil partnership in 2005 and they
have recently had a son via donated sperm.

The hot gold contenders

Guo Jingjing China's 26-year-old diving diva is the hottest female
athlete at the Olympics. But back off, boys - her boyfriend is the Hong
Kong business tycoon Kenneth Fok Kai-kong

Usain Bolt The Jamaican sprinter, who celebrated his 22nd birthday
yesterday, smashed both 100 metres and 200 metres world records. Let's
hope he doesn't do everything at that speed

Silver

Eamon Sullivan Swimmer, aged 22, from Perth, ensures that these Games
aren't a complete wash-out for the Aussies

Yelena Isinbayeva The 26-year-old Russian pole-vaulter - “the chick with
the stick” - takes the women's silver medal

Bronze

Laure Manaudou French swimmer, aged 21 and 5ft 10in, takes the bronze
medal place for women.

Pete Reed British rower and Royal Navy lieutenant, aged 27, 6ft 7in,
100kg, blue eyes - and he's ours


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Too bad we didn't get to see all of the Olympics.