Four years ago the winning medal went to Cuba, thanks to a remark from Australian basketball player Michelle Trims: "The Cubans are using up condoms as if they're about to go out of fashion."
This time around the talk of sex is slightly more discreet, but matters are still exciting when it comes to the unofficial "sport" going on in the suffocating summer heat at the Athens Games.
The debate about whether athletes should have sex or refrain on the night before a big competition was yet again broached by the Greek newspaper Ta Nea.
The newspaper found some surprising opinions: German physicians and Russian psychologists are in favor of sexual relations prior to a big sports event, but Israeli experts only approve of sex in the case of women athletes.
"If the athlete is conditioned by social or religious factors, the influence of sex is negative. But it has not been proved scientifically that sex before competing has a negative effect," said Tassos Stalikas, a Greek sports psychologist.
Durex gave 130,000 condoms and 30,000 portions of lubricating creams to Olympic village administrators for use by athletes. That was 40,000 more than the 90,000 distributed in Sydney, but considerably lower than the 250,000 condoms given away at the Salt Lake City 2002 winter games.
"It's hard to hold back and be modest when faced with so many good-looking people here," Canadian rower Marni McBin was quoted as saying by German newspaper Bild, which gave a detailed account of the sex lives of athletes.
"There are no preliminaries," said German hockey player Christian Blunck, who earned a gold medal in Barcelona. "Everyone gets straight to the point. After all, these are athletes in perfect physical shape. And there's no time to spare."
"It's heaven for men," exclaimed Christian Keller, spokesman for German athletes.
The topic of sex seems to make village administrators uncomfortable. "One thousand condoms were distributed, but I think they were taken as souvenirs," an administrator said.
The figure is right, it is 1,000 condoms, but every day. That's the number of condoms athletes take every 24 hours from machines near the village clinic.
Those are in addition to the ones given to athletes as gifts when they arrive.
The Athens Olympic Games Organizing Committee was scandalized by the Greek edition of Playboy which ran a feature about "2004 seconds of ecstasy" and another about "seeking the gold in the sexathlon" next to five condoms displayed as the famous Olympic rings.
The Greek edition of Men's Health also analyzed the subject of sex and sports. According to the magazine, male swimmers have the best staying power and French athletes most frequently have sex.
Perhaps the Cuban gold medal won at Sydney is at risk this summer.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS