Some of the competitors at the London Olympic Games are lusting for more than just a gold medal. Sex in the Olympic Village certainly isn’t a recent phenomenon. It’s hard to imagine that you could gather together 10,000 of the world’s fittest bodies in one sweaty space and not expect them to want to “unwind”. When the athletes ran through the supply of 70,000 condoms at the Sydney 2000 Games, organizers ordered another 20,000, prompting a new standing order of 100,000 at subsequent Summer Games.
A titillating article in ESPN The Magazine reports on a variety of tawdry tales from Olympiads past ranging from French handballers stripping down to their skivvies and neckties and feeding each other in the cafeteria to sex out in the open, on the green lawns and between buildings. Swimmer Ryan Lochte estimates that up to 75 percent of Olympians are hooking up in the Village, and when you think about it, why not?
In fact, the recent surge of Olympians in London caused the popular gay pick-up app Grindr to crash last week. As a resident told a local paper, “It happened almost as soon as the teams got here. Either loads of athletes were logging on to meet fellow Olympians or were looking to bag a local.” If it’s a Brit they seek, they have quite a few to choose from – the city boasts 350,000 Grindr users and counting.
The Huffington Post speculated that the incident might have been an elaborate stunt orchestrated by the app’s creators, who used their apology of the 24-hour suspension of service in London to reveal that an updated version will debut later in the summer.
Not only are the athletes hungry for sex, so are the tourists that flood the city to attend the Games. There are differing reports of the exact influence on sex tourism resulting from a large scale sporting event. The BBC predicted that thousands of site workers, spectators and athletes are expected to fuel the sex industry boom at the London Games, resulting in an increase in human trafficking.
Since the 2004 Athens Games first invoked warnings about the increase in sex tourism, most other major international sporting events such as the World Cup have followed suit. While it was initially reported that sex trafficking doubled during the Athens Games, it was later found that cases rose from 93 to 181, none of which were found to be linked to the Olympics in any way by Greek authorities.
In keeping with London mayor Boris Johnson’s vocal crackdown on prostitution and human trafficking in the lead up the Games, 80 brothels were temporarily closed in the east London borough of Newham, which is home to the central stadium. Sex workers were said to be “cleared from the streets” around the stadium by the AFP, making it more presentable for the 2 million expected to descend upon the area. Critics of the crackdown point out that displacing sex workers merely endangers their welfare and does little curb the sex trade as a whole.
Photo credit: http://www.blippitt.com/emergency-condom-shipment-heads-to-olympic-athlete
