Okay, we all know that the London Olympics were successful and
full of great surprises. Good for the winners, bad for the losers.
But toward the end, it was getting more and more difficult to
concentrate on fractions of seconds or bits of centimeters.
Official swimsuits and track garb have shrunk below bikini size and
were enough to set public fantasies racing.
This was possibly the sexiest Olympics yet, flesh everywhere and
proud of it — the best legal turn-on since the tutu hit the Royal
Ballet.
I watched the whole show on French television where coverage was
focused on events the French had a chance of winning. We probably
got a larger dose of the fleshmarket than American viewers. I have
heard very little criticism of the erotic undertones, but then we
have a habit of saying one thing and thinking another.
I know grown men and a few women who sat in the privacy of their
living rooms watching the competitions and let their minds roam as
the athletes strutted their well-toned bodies in public. The
swimmers stripped off ostentatiously and we wondered where they
would stop. The public rinsing was even more provocative. Our eyes
took in the women’s six-packs, the men’s muscle definition and the
very skimpy and stretchy national running suits wrapped around the
gorgeous blondes of East Europe, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. They
almost never won except in men’s minds. And those synchronized
divers — were they wearing thongs? Something very close to
that.
Nothing beat the high jump in which girls landed on their necks
and did a slow roll backwards. The camera innocently followed every
second, then reran it in slow motion.
The women viewers got their share, too. A single mother of my
acquaintance says she was caught staring at Trey Hardee, the
6-foot-5 U.S. decathlon competitor, as he limbered up for a run.
Her 9-year-old son said, “Mom, why are you looking at him like
that?”
Another woman friend admitted to me, “I couldn’t take my eyes
off this show. I didn’t even care who won.”
One office worker tells of watching a colleague stare transfixed
at the television in the company cafeteria. It was a women’s beach
volleyball match and his mouth was hanging open. “He couldn’t have
been that interested in the score — they weren’t even Americans,”
she said. She looked in on him out 20 minutes later and he hadn’t
budged. He never got around to his lunch.
British sprinter Linford Christie seems to have started the
overt sexual strutting when in the 1992 Olympics he ran the 100
meters in Lycra shorts. The Sun newspaper in London
immortalized the sight as “Linford’s lunchbox.” Ever since, suits
have gotten steadily tighter and skimpier.
One has to pity the poor men from the Middle East who rarely see
more than an ankle or a wrist. They must have been cross-eyed with
frustration. Now they are starting to send their women into
competition, albeit wearing ample cover, at least for now.
Where is this leading? We will find out when Brazil hosts the
games. They are miles ahead of us. They invented the string bikini.
The Gillette women’s Venus razor (“Reveal the goddess in you”)
should do very well in 2016.
