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Sex In The Village (Don't Forget To Perform)

Jul 19, 2012  - Craig Lord

Every four years for the past seven Games (at least, to my knowledge and according to the media cuttings archive), the dorms where the sportsmen and women will gather for the Olympic Games has attracted references such as that described in an AP headline today: "Sex In The City" move over. Here comes "Sex In The Village." 

They're all at it, we're led to believe: 10,000 super-fit young men and women locked in party mode for two weeks of unbridled passion. Not much room for performance of a different kind, you might imagine - but no, it seems.

"The Olympics is the height of your career, so you might do some things you don't usually do," British beach volleyball player Shauna Mullin told reporters with a giggle. AP adds hastily: "Most, like Mullin, will restrain from going too far, aware they're in the international spotlight."

In the midst of the Carry-On style references in British papers, there is a thread of "yes, sex, we all do it - it's how we got here".

Take the man in charge of the health of the Brazilian team, Dr Joao Neto: "(Sex) is common at the Olympics. It's necessary. It's natural. If you are going to be healthy people, why not make sex? ... Brazil is very tolerant with sex as a country. We don't have Victorian minds and we're not religious."

Ivory Coast swimmer Kouassi Brou was one of the youngest competitors in Beijing at 16. Four years on, he's ready to perform - but not in the pool perhaps. "In 2008 I was so young and so shy, so I didn't interact with the women. But now I'm a big man. So I can try. I will try," he said. Well, good luck. And try not to forget protection (let alone the swimming and all those development grants that have come your federation's way so you can be there).

Thousands of free condoms, as has become custom at the Games, will be available. Needed too if the words of one American soccer player are to be believed: "On the grass, between buildings, people are getting down and dirty," she told ESPN recently.

That is not a picture many athletes identify with, of course. "It's not something I've seen at all. ... Maybe I wasn't up on the right nights," Australian canoeist Warwick Draper said. "It's not something I think you'd expect to see in the village."

Not the centre of all that athletes are about either, the impact of high achievers spilling into the wider world in many a positive way, including a role as role models on fitness and diet. Take this example from Down Under, Inner Nutrition, run by former internationals Gregor (Britain) and Alice (Australia, nee Mills) Tait.

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