Olympics: Crucible of Champions or International F**k-fest?

Courtesy of Dimmy Karras, the best article on the Olympics. EVER.

If you're like me, you assumed that Olympians spent two weeks in their spartan Olympic Village rooms overcoming challenges, thinking about the challenges they overcame, being inspirational, and staring with soft eyes into the hazy light of the glorious future, thinking of God and Country.

Nope. They're f**king.

All. The. Time.

Turns out, ladies and gents, that when you get a gazillion gorgeous young bodies from around the world together and introduce them to people they will never see again in their lives, naughtiness ensues. The French are the sluttiest, but they only do it with each other, the Aussies and the Canadians are tied for drunkest. The Cubans, apparently, are the fastest:

At the Albertville winter Olympics, condom machines in the athletes’ village had to be refilled every two hours. And in Sydney the organisers’ original order of 70,000 condoms went so fast that they had to order 20,000 more. Even with the replenishment, the supply was exhausted three days before the end of the competition schedule. (For the record, athletes who were in Sydney report that the Cuban delegation was the first to use up its allocation.) Salt Lake City in 2002 went even bigger: 250,000 condoms were handed out, despite the objections of the city’s Mormon leadership.

And let's hear it for our good friend, booze, helping us all speak the international language:

The latest attraction is free internet service, which Marco Buechel, an alpine ski racer who competes for Liechtenstein, put to good use in Salt Lake City. "You can contact any athlete, even if you don’t know them at all," says Buechel. "They give you a list when you get there. Everybody uses it. I saw this beautiful ski racer, from Greece of all places. She had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. I saw her at the village and sent her an e-mail, in English. Her reply was very short: ‘Not good English. Want meet you.’"

According to Buechel, he and the Greek beauty made arrangements to meet soon after. "We tried to talk, which wasn’t very successful," says Buechel, "and then we started to drink, which was much more successful." And? "It was very beautiful," he says. "A beautiful international incident."

But more than that, it sounds to me like a sexier version of band camp, where we all sat around (looking hot and sexy) trying to guess what instruments the other campers played. Olympians do this too!

Kent remembers sitting in the village, watching athletes walk through the door and playing a game of Guess What They Do. "The bikers have skinny little upper bodies, farmer tans and massive, clean-shaven thighs. Invert them and you get the kayakers, who have skinny little legs and massive backs and shoulders. The seven-foot-tall giant who ducks under the doorway entering the cafeteria is probably from basketball. The seven-foot giant who smacks his head on the door frame is definitely a rower; they don’t have that hand-eye co-ordination thing. The kids running at the rowers’ ankles with the high-pitched voices are gymnasts. It just goes on and on. Being at the village is like taking your place in a wild anatomical parade seen nowhere else on the planet."

Except for us, it was like "that snooty bitch is totally a flute player, the pretty boy is first trumpet, and the guy in the Primus shirt is either trombone or percussion. And plays bass in a band."

But back to the Olympics. I have to hand it to this newspaper, the Scotsman, for getting the greatest quote you'll hear this year on the Olympics, and the inspiration for my discreet asterisks throughout this post:

Dick Roth remembers Tokyo in the 1960s, a time before sex studies and internet hook-ups - and yet still very much alive. "It was a lot more innocent back then," he says, "but not only did I see it, I participated in it. You’ve been working so hard, and everybody is so in the absolute prime of life, and everyone looks so good. This was before the sexual revolution, and it was discreet. But it was happening."

Then he pauses for a moment. "I know I have to be careful when I talk to a journalist, but I can say this: It wasn’t the f**k-fest it is now."