Sex in the (Olympic) City

Matthew Syed, a former two-time Olympic competitor turned sports commentator, pulls back the covers of what goes on behind closed doors and reveals a shameful reality of the interaction between athletes inside the Olympic Village.

In his article for the Times Online (go find it yourself – there are some images on there I would rather not be responsible for providing for you), Syed remarks of his own time in the Village as an athlete:

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. 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. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out – in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

He goes on to say:

This sex fest was not limited to Barcelona: the same thing happened in Sydney in 2000, my second Olympics as an athlete, and is happening right here in Beijing, where this time I’m a commentator. I spoke to an Aussie table tennis player this week to check out the village vibe and he launched into the breathless patter common to any Olympic debutant: “It is unbelievable in there; everyone is totally crazy once they are out of their competitions. God knows what it is going to be like this weekend. It is like a world within a world.”

One of the observations Syed makes is the fact that, for most of these athletes (except for the host country), the village is thousands of miles from their home, and perhaps, they figure, thousands of miles from any accountability or consequences. I am reminded as I think of this of a scene in the movie, The Firm, when Mitch McDeere (played by Tom Cruise) is meeting with a client in Jamaica and uses extremely harsh language and imagery to sell the firm’s client on what action to take. Afterwards McDeere appears ashamed of himself for his tactics in getting the sale. Of course, later in the film (and most certainly due to the fact that his familiar surroundings are hours away by jet), Mitch falls yet even further as he betrays his wife with another woman.

This got me thinking about people in general (and beyond just the issue of sex), and especially about Christians, who travel significant distances or are away from home for extended periods…or who just take frequent overnight business trips, for that matter. Do they behave away from home any differently than the way they act when they are not traveling? Is there a temptation to do things that they would not even think of doing around the house, or in their home town, when they are in another city, or another country? Do their drinking and eating habits change? Does their use of language change? Does what they watch on TV in the hotel room differ from what they would normally watch at home?

Why is it, when we travel, that we think God doesn’t know where we have gone?