Following up on Finneye’s post on sex at the Olympics, I noticed this interesting observation from the writer, Matthew Syed, himself a former Olympian: When it comes to sex, women want the winners and men want the hotties.

There is a busy weekend ahead in the Olympic Village. Matthew Syed, a columnist for TimesOnLine and a former international table tennis player who has represented Britain in two Olympic Games is sharing his views on athletes’ sexual behavior during the Games. As a former Olympic athlete he is frequently asked whether the Olympic Village is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. His only answer, based on his personal experience, is: too right it is!

... once we were eliminated from our respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers. There may have been a fair amount of gay sex going on, too - but given the notorious homophobia in sport it was rather more covert.

The only place where the action in Beijing seems to be lacking is the Olympic Village. The 10,500 athletes on hand for the Games aren’t picking up free condoms that were all the rage in Sydney and Athens. I guess the Redeem Team and Kobe Bryant brought their own.

There’s 100,000 free condoms up for grabs for the athletes and some two-thirds of them are going unused. Uh, the math on that means nearly 10 condoms per athlete for an event that lasts 17 days. In Vancouver in 2010, there will be 18 condoms for each of the 5,500 athletes. Even Kobe can’t need that many.

You can thank Elasun for this one. The Chinese condom maker caught the Olympic spirit through an ad campaign that works condoms into references for the sports being played in Beijing. Think of Kobe Bryant dunking into a condom, Michael Rogers cycling on two condom tires and Michael Phelps swimming over rubber ridges.

It’s disappointing to see the Beijing Olympics veering back into gender testing — which was supposedly abandoned in 1999 by the IOC.  But their move is not surprising.  The Chinese are applying “The Art of War” to international sports in a classic way.

They want to win piles of medals and prove their superiority as an emerging world power.  As the host country that sets policy for these Games, they have surely scoured their own team, to make sure all karyotypes conform to XX and XY.  However, their late announcement that they intend to test will place other countries at a psychological disadvantage.  These countries have already selected their teams, and some of those selectees might not pass the test.  So it will constitute a pre-competition strategy for Chinese authorities to summon any athlete they choose for testing.  Even if that individual passes the test, her psyche may be jarred and she may not perform as well.  Imagine the anxiety of waiting for test results, when you know that loss of your career, your previous medals, might result.

…Because they’re so hospitable. The telegraph.co.uk reports that:

the 16,000 competitors staying in the Beijing village will be able to purchase a wide variety of soft pornography, including erotic books featuring provocative pictures of naked women.