When former Florida gymnast Bridget Sloan traveled to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, she was 16. At the time, she had no idea the olympic village turned into an adult playground after dark.
“Sex was never, ever a thought for me,” she said.
“I was definitely very naive.”
As first reported by Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo, the International Olympic Committee will be thrusting 350,000 male condoms, 100,000 female condoms and 175,000 vials of lubricant into the olympic village. That works out to about 42 condoms per athlete over the 19-day event.
For the Olympic Committee to run out of their supply of condoms, each athlete would have to finagle more than twice a day, every day.
Sloan said while sex wasn’t a thought for her at the Olympics, it didn’t seem to be a thought for anyone else either.
“I met a lot of different athletes, and that was never a topic of conversation,” she said.
“I heard about it and I was like, ‘Wait, that was a thing? People actually did that?’”
But she was young, as were many of her friends on the USA gymnastics team. What about someone older?
Marquis Dendy will make his Olympic debut in Rio as a long jumper on team USA’s track and field squad.
The 23-year-old Florida graduate said that while he’s heard about what goes on between competitions, he’s trying to ignore it.
“Everyone talks about sex at the Olympics,” Dendy wrote in a direct message on Twitter.
“However, my focus isn’t on sex at all. My focus is getting a medal. Seeing how this is my first Olympics, I don’t have much room for outside thoughts and distractions.”
Sloan feels that if she were back at the Olympics knowing what she knows now, she would feel similarly.
She can’t imagine herself — or anyone on team USA — concentrating on anything other than winning.
“We’re such a dominant country that when we go to the Olympic games, we know that we have a job to do, and we’re not only representing ourselves but the United States,” she said. “And that makes a big difference.
“I think that for any country that is a dominant country, they don’t really allow their athletes to just go in there and go buck wild.”
Contact Ethan Bauer at ebauer@alligator.org and follow him on Twitter @ebaueri
Florida's Marquis Dendy leaps on his way to winning the triple jump during the NCAA track and field championships in Eugene, Ore., Friday, June 12, 2015.
