I hate to be the one to burst your goodly Olympic bubble, but Olympic athletes are fucking crazy. And you can take that as literally as you'd like.
Did you know that at the 2002 Olympics in Sydney, athletes in the Olympic Village were provided with 70,000 condoms, and they ran out? True enough. An emergency order of an additional 20,000 prophylactics had to be shipped in. Nowadays, 100,000 condoms is the standard Olympic order.
Despite all the heart-warming profiles you're sure to see on NBC this summer, make no mistake: Olympic athletes are some of the most myopic, single-minded Type A personalities in the world. They exist on a bizarre fringe of society, especially the ones in individual sports, because most of them possess a rare combination of physical talent, and emotional/mental disability.
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"Athletes are extremists," said U.S. women's soccer 'keeper Hope Solo, putting it midly. "When they're training, it's laser focus. When they go out for a drink, it's 20 drinks."
And when they're sexin', they're really sexin'.
Supposedly, there's a "what happens in the village stays in the village" protocol, but it's total bullshit. Everyone know the place is a massive orgy, and the athletes love tell of it, with no small amount of boasting rippling underneath coy reluctance.
ESPNW somehow managed to convince a big handful of current and former Olympians from the world over to go into detail about what sexual gods and goddesses they all are, and how much sex they have with one another in the exclusive little Best Athletes In The World club.
Here's an excerpt from the ESPNW story;
"It's like the first day of college," says water polo captain Tony Azevedo, a veteran of Beijing, Athens and Sydney who is returning to London. "You're nervous, super excited. Everyone's meeting people and trying to hook up with someone."
Which is perfectly understandable, if not to be expected. Olympians are young, supremely healthy people who've been training with the intensity of combat troops for years. Suddenly they're released into a cocoon where prying reporters and overprotective parents aren't allowed. Pre-competition testosterone is running high. Many Olympians are in tapering mode, full of excess energy because they're maintaining a training diet of up to 9,000 calories per day while not actually training as hard. The village becomes "a pretty wild scene, the biggest melting pot you've been in," says Eric Shanteau, an American who swam in Beijing and will be heading to London.
The dining hall is among everyone's first village stops. "When I walked in for the first time in Atlanta," says women's soccer player Brandi Chastain, "there were loud cheers. So we look over and see two French handballers dressed only in socks, shoes, jockstraps, neckties and hats on top of a dining table, feeding one another lunch. We're like, 'Holy cow, what is this place?'" Many liken it to a high school cafeteria, "except everyone's beautiful," says Julie Foudy, who has two golds and one silver from playing soccer in three Olympics and is now an analyst for ESPN. "We'd graze over our food for hours watching all the eye candy, wondering why I got married."
From one end of the village to the other, flags hang from windows and music blares from balconies. "Unlike at a bar, it's not awkward to strike up a conversation because you have something in common," Solo says. "It starts with, 'What sport do you play?' All of a sudden, you're fist-bumping." BMXer Jill Kintner, who won bronze in Beijing, says the Italians are particularly inviting: "They leave their doors open, so you look in and see dudes in thongs running circles around each other."
On the way to practice fields, "the girls are in skimpy panties and bras, the dudes in underwear, so you see what everybody is working with from the jump," says Breaux Greer, an American javelin thrower. "Even if their face is a 7, their body is a 20.
A 20! That's, like, twice as good as the 10s that all us commoners are drooling over all the time.
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The tricky part for the athletes comes as the games progress and some of the athletes are done competing, while others are still gearing up for the biggest moments of their fleeting lives.
"I'd get home from the clubs at 6 or 7 a.m., and I'd feel bad for the track and field guys," said Swiss swimmer Dominil Meichtry. "They're getting on a bus and we're intoxicated, wearing fedoras, looking like crap."
Wait, that's an oxymoron - wearing fedoras and looking like crap.
Anyway, as you while away the latter half of the summer watching your favo(u)rite Olympians on the boob tube, remember that they are not Olympians because they are courageous, heroic and pure; most of them are there because they are too imbalanced to lead normal lives, so they pour their entire existence, beyond what is reasonable, sane or healthy, into their training. They arrive at the games, go batshit crazy, fuck the hell out of one another for three weeks, then go home and get woefully depressed.
But they represent us so well!
USA.
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Follow on Ology: Bison Messink | 2012 Olympics
Follow on Twitter: @BisonMessink | @OlogySports
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