Happy Friday
So the Olympics end today.
yawn
I haven't watched any of it. But I bet one thing wasn't clear in the televised events:
Sex and the Olympic City
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.
Ah, gotta love the hypocrisy, no? The whole article is really interesting.
2 comments:
Interesting, no? Athletes, having spent months or years in a bubble
of repressed desires (or, focussed
one?) are thrust into the crucible
of worldwide expectations, against
similarly tuned competition. Can
you say,"the pause that refreshes"?
Even morality mongers know not to
jump in the middle of conflicting
pressures of this magnitude. I half
expect that the whole Olympic villagers would do well to lash
matresses to their backs, at least
after their finals.
It looks like that's pretty much what they do. I so love how the media white-washes them all though.
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