Jamaican Track and Field Athletes

Sex and the Olympic Village

When the lights and competitions go out, the home of the athletes hosts some of the wildest and exclusive parties in town

Daily Mirror

     

Posted On Wednesday, July 18, 2012 at 09:08:31 AM

It probably shouldn’t come as any surprise. Imagine thousands (in the case of this year’s games, seventeen-thousand) of muscly, toned athletes crammed together in one place and either celebrating their Olympic success or simply enjoying the experience of the games having finished their events.  The booze flows, international relations are improved over a few bottles of whatever someone can get their hands on and inevitably one thing leads to another.   Yet despite the longstanding rumours of the athlete’s village being the ultimate party venue, few of those to have experienced it had revealed its sexy secrets until now.  In a revealing piece from the ESPN magazine’s latest ‘Body Issue’ several Olympic stars of past and present have lifted the lid on some of the late-night antics.  American target shooter Josh Lakatos recounts tales of a house in Sydney that he turned into the ultimate party house following the end of his and his team’s participation in the Games, and as things swiftly got very steamy a wave of realisation hit him, “I’m running a friggin’ brothel in the Olympic Village! I’ve never witnessed so much debauchery in my entire life.”  •   Gymnast Alicia Sacramone told the magazine about how adolescent gymnasts got sassy with the water polo and judo boys who shared their training room. “That’s where most of my socialisation took place,” she said. (Top) Hope Solo, the US football goalkeeper, observed, “There’s a lot of sex going on.” While not every athlete ends up running a knocking shop like Lakatos, where a duffel bag of thousands of condoms was left by the door to ensure that all of the X-rated comings-andgoings were at least performed safely.   It’s no new phenomenon either, as three-time Olympic diver and fourtime Olympic gold medallist Greg Louganis revealed about the US team’s friendship with the Russians in the Montreal village in 1976: “Once events were over, our entire diet was caviar, vodka and Russian champagne.  It was crazy,” and the sexual interactions weren’t confined by orientation as one married Russian was “hooking up with one of the other male divers on the team” in plain view of his compatriots and newly-found chums.  The Winter Olympics are no exception, with a skier that took part in the 2010 games in Vancouver lifting the lid on a six-way “whirlpool orgy” that occurred between “some Germans, Canadians and Austrians” in Whistler.  Unsurprisingly, as more events come to their conclusions the party gets kicked into full flow. Hope Solo, the US women’s soccer goalkeeper who became famous for her looks as well as ability in the last Women’s World Cup, succinctly observed, “There’s a lot of sex going on.”  How much? “I’d say it’s 70 percent to 75 percent of Olympians,” says American swimmer Ryan Lochte. Solo goes on to recount a story about the Beijing closing ceremony: “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we met a bunch of celebrities. Vince Vaughn partied with us. Steve Byrne, the comedian.  And at some point we decided to take the party back to the village, so we started talking to the security guards, showed off our gold medals, got their attention and snuck our group through without credentials — which is absolutely unheard of.”  And, she reveals, “I may have snuck a celebrity back to my room without anybody knowing, and snuck him back out.  But that’s my Olympic secret.” Whether London will see such debauchery, we are yet to see, but American 400m star LaShawn Merritt is going to try and leave his stamp on the 2012 games, “An Olympics to remember has to have those stories,” Merritt says.   “But I was too locked in in Beijing. This time, when I’m done leaving my legacy on the track. I’ll make sure London remembers me.”