Parties and sex in the Olympic Village: life beyond sports at the Olympic Games

In addition to marks and medals, The Olympic Games are often accompanied by a specific extra sports activity in the Olympic Village.

Thousands of athletes, young and beautiful, many of them uncommitted, are locked up for two weeks in a facility of less than 50 hectares where the bar closes early and the sale of alcohol is prohibited.

A little fun and a lot of desire to meet people and relieve the stress that competition brings. Result: a remarkable amount of sexual relations, many athletes confess and silenced by the most modest.

As our colleague Joan Justribó explained in 2012, in the London Athletes’ Village, 150,000 condoms were made available to its inhabitants, the largest number up to that point in the history of the Games, after the 120,000 distributed in Beijing were exhausted four years ago.

The festive atmosphere is palpable in the apartment blocks being built in Stratford, to the point of bothering some like Serbian swimmer Milorad Cavicthe man who would deny Phelps an eighth gold medal at Beijing 2008. Cavic lamented that London town “looks like Ibiza, with loud music until after midnight. Sometimes I wonder what we’re doing here.”

The answer is clear for some: take advantage of a unique opportunity to have a good time. Of course, to have access to confessions on the subject, you have to wait, sometimes years, because no one wants to talk about it when they fall into the competition.

That’s why it took more than a decade for skier Carrie Sheinberg to admit that at the Lillehammer 94 Winter Games she made one of the most daring propositions of her life: two German bobsleigh pilots offered him their gold medals “in exchange for pleasure.”

American javelinist Breaux Greer admitted a few years after the Sydney Games He was in a relationship in town with two athletes at the same time, a pole vaulter and a hurdler.

The prize goes to the brave Josh Lakatos, an American shooter who became the housekeeper of an improvised brothel in the town of Sydney in 2000.

As the athletes returned to their respective countries after competing, one of the buildings was completely empty.

He took control of it and ‘invited’ couples who needed space to use the quiet facility. “After all I’m running a brothel in the village. I’ve never seen so much lewdness in my life”he admitted years later.

Hope Solo, Olympic women’s soccer champion in the United States in Beijing 2008, clarified in an interview with ESPN that there is a lot of sex in the Games.

“There is a lot of sex. I’ve seen people doing it outside, on the grass, between buildings…“. Words corroborated by one of the United States’ Olympic stars, swimmer Ryan Lochte, who assures that “70 percent of the people do it in the Village.” Surprisingly, most delegations impose separating people into rooms.

Olympic couples

With the Spanish, discretion is absolute. No one talks about it, no one gives a single name of course, but everyone has heard stories. And some are also about love. Roger Federer and his wife, former tennis player Mirka Vavrinec, met in the town of Sydney. The same thing arose between gymnast Shawn Johnson and cyclist Taylor Phinney.