Condoms at the 2010 Winter Olympics

A few weeks ago, I was watching part of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I am not sure what the official title was of the sport that I was watching, but it consisted of a bunch of extremely gorgeous girls skiing down a very steep mountain fast enough that it was making me very nervous and making it very difficult for me to digest the burger and fries I had just eaten. The weather was horrendous on these Olympic ski slopes…in fact, it looked to me like blizzard conditions, but who am I kidding? I am from South Texas and a light snow flurry looks like a catastrophic blizzard to me. Bottom line: the weather seemed awful for these gorgeous girls to be skiing down the steep hill while trying to hit these little colored flags with their ski pole thingies. But I digress. As I mentioned earlier, it seemed every one of these women had emerged from a fashion magazine shoot only to decide one day to participate in the Winter Olympics and win a gold medal.

It is no wonder then that health officials have made it a point to distribute tens of thousands of condoms to athletes visiting the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. In fact, ten years ago, before the 2000 Sydney Olympics, approximately 70,000 condoms were provided for the athletes and it turned out that they were short by approximately 20,000. Both the Vancouver Olympics this year and the Beijing Olympics two years ago had a distribution of 100,000 condoms; however, since there are not as many athletes that attend the Winter Olympics vs. the Summer Olympics, each athlete had more condoms available to him/her this Winter. In fact, reports estimate that for “each of the 7,000 athletes, coaches, trainers and officials housed in the Games’ two villages,” there are 14 condoms readily provided.

The reason for the providing of condoms to these athletes? That was best explained by a UNAIDS China spokesman, “There are many young, strong, single people in the athletes’ village and, like everywhere, some will fall in love or other things so we need to make condoms available.” In fact, Matthew Syed, a table tennis player who participated in the 2008 Olympics called them a “sex fest.” Here is his description of his own experience two years ago:

“There were the gorgeous hostesses - there to assist the athletes - in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes - literally thousands of them - strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out.”

Wow.