Most athletes going for gold at the Olympics would probably rather take home a medal than something nasty and they've had some help on that front. About 8500 condoms were supplied to athletes at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, 110,000 in Sydney and 130,000 at Athens - with 150,000 predicted to be distributed at the London games in August. ''And the majority of those get used,'' said sports journalist James Buckley, who includes these and other salacious details in the ebook Sex and the Olympics: The Unauthorised Guide.
But the notion that athletes, usually in their 20s and 30s and in peak condition, might turn to other pursuits once the competition was over was not so surprising. ''They're all fitness freaks and charged up on adrenalin and testosterone and they've been disciplined for so long,'' he said.
And it's not just unwanted additions to the Olympic family the organisers are concerned about. ''There's actually a fair bit [of STD] floating around, which is largely one of the reasons why the IOC are providing condoms at every Games,'' he said.
Gender identification, sex workers at the Games and the effect of sex before competition are other areas explored in the book.
''What goes on inside the village between those walls is the hardest stuff to find,'' said Buckley, although ''ex-athletes sometimes decades down the track start to allude to what they have been up to …''
