How to use the Rio Olympics to have your own summer of sex in London

The Games begin next week and hot-blooded athletes are already eyeing up the competition. But why should they have all the fun? Phoebe Luckhurst has a Londoner’s guide to going for gold
Models frolic on the beach in Rio
Jon Feingersh/Getty Images

This year shagging is an Olympic sport. Rio 2016 starts next Friday but personal bests have been sidelined by another record-breaking figure: the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is reportedly providing 450,000 condoms for the 10,500 athletes. It is also laying on 175,000 packets of lube.

Associated Press reports that “part of the reason” for the increase is that 100,000 of the condoms in the provision are female ones, which could help to counter the spread of the Zika virus. This is, obviously, very important. But some observers point out that even accounting for that, the 450,000 figure is three times higher than that at London 2012. Perhaps this year’s crop of thoroughbreds are considered to be an extraordinarily horny bunch.

Alternatively, the generous allocation might be a reaction to the anguish encircling the globe. The sexual liberation of the Sixties was part discovery, part activism — the sexual is political. Maybe we can shag all our problems away. Or maybe Brazil is just sexier than London (“maybe”). For if the Olympics is a distillation of the mood and values of its host nation, we look joyless by comparison.

So we must get in on the action and use the competition as an excuse for fun. Our bodies are not hewn, our endurance is not professional. But, happily, some of the competitors have a wanton (literally) disregard for the strictures of the physical class system. For example, (hot) US Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is looking for amorous mortals on Tinder: “I’ve been matching up with a bunch of gorgeous women who are smart — they have professional jobs and everything,” he said this week.

Team GB medal targets for Rio Olympics

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Besides, even if you’re not getting off with a top athlete, you can take advantage of the mood. Remember London 2012? Warm evenings watching medallists on big screens; spritzes and cold beers and gins in tins; throwing your arms spontaneously around a stranger who, incidentally, you observed, had rather nice arms.

Don’t mistake that for the exuberance of a host nation: Rio 2016 could be just as good. It’s basically all the fun and none of the tourists dawdling through Green Park trying — sixth time lucky! — to get onto the Jubilee line. Watching elite machines launch through the air in Lycra will put bad thoughts in your head. Plus, the boss is on holiday, so who cares where you wake up?

This is how to use the Olympics to have your own summer of lust.

Position your pin-ups

Fit bodies inspire base hunger. Staring at a regulation hottie on the podium you realise you want a piece of that. You want to feel the heft of those muscles, to stroke the crevices of those abs. Subsequently, inevitably, you realise that everyone has a body: that guy over there, that woman on the Tube. You are hyper-attuned — the euphemistic way of saying you’re panting like a teenage boy.

Unfortunately, you can’t just go sidling up to strangers in the street waggling your tongue lasciviously. There are, rightly, rules about that sort of thing. You must be clever: use the visual currency of our digital age to make everyone feel as worked up as you do.

Team USA’s champion swimmer Ryan Lochte, who recently joined dating site Tinder 
Clive Rose/Getty Images

Fancy someone you work with? Print out a picture of a hottie — maybe the lithe, elegant Team GB heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson — and leave it on their desk. Text your friend-with-benefits a picture of US surfer Alana Blanchard, or Team USA’s star mixed martial artist Michelle Waterson, with a disarming comment about their “skills”.

If you’re making a play for your hot housemate, leave a copy of US Vogue lying in the living room: its cover stars are supermodel Gigi Hadid and superdecathlete Ashton Eaton, two flawless specimens of athletic health.

Make Italian swimmer Luca Dotto your screensaver and then break your girlfriend’s laptop so that she has to use yours. After a day staring at him she will leap into your arms when you get home from work.

Dress like an Olympian

Swinging layers and baggy sleeves distract from the gold-medal objective: athletes wear few clothes so they can compete better. Conveniently, this means you can see their muscles bulging.

US beach volleyballer Lane Carico 
Mike Stobe/Getty Images

Now, admittedly, it is a hard sell to claim you too need to be in tight Lycra at work. Your job does not demand flexibility or agility — you’re in PR. However, channelling the Olympic dress code in your downtime is not merely opportunistic, it is veritably fashionable — it’s called athleisure.

You’ve been to the gym a few times this year — you reckon you’d look OK in the right leggings. Bae has seemed a little dispirited recently: cheer her up by popping your guns. You will look lean and healthy, you will look like the sort of person who’s always “just going for a run”. You will look like you might have completed some kind of endurance event at some point in the past.

Sex games

You’ve found an accomplice: congratulations, you’re desirable. Now you need to remember how it all works. Sure, you remember the mechanics of missionary — a vanilla shagger never forgets — but in this summer of lust it seems a shame not to get a bit more flexible.

Channel a gymnast and buckle those limbs. The pommel horse looks a bit like something you’d find in a tantric dungeon — improvise your own version using a kitchen chair or breakfast bar stool. Use your yoga mat like the gym mat, practise high-jumping onto your bed. A big arrival will show you mean business in the bedroom.

British diver Tom Daley

Record time

Timing is everything. To match the Olympians shag-for-shag you must be a mathlete. The IOC’s allocation of condoms works out at 42 per competitor and there are 17 days of Olympics. That leaves us with almost 2.5 condoms a day, which means you’re going to have to do the dirty double every day for almost three weeks. It’s a marathon, but your country needs you.

Sneak in a session before breakfast.You’ll get to work flushed but just say you had an epiphany when you saw the velodrome and now you’re a cyclist.

If you’re hooking up with a colleague, squeeze into a cupboard or crawl under a desk in a vacant meeting room. Put the Olympics on in the evening and then get down to it in front of the telly. Meta.

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Pants, pants, pants

You have never been deluded by sexy lingerie: your pants are stubbornly functional. Luckily, once every four years they are also inadvertently on trend. For your pants — thick waistband, good cover, roomy — are exactly like those the runners wear. If you squint, your arse almost looks as good as a heptathlete’s.

Take advantage: give your undies an airing as much as you can. Get ’em out in the park, get ’em out around the flat. You are seductive, you are golden. If seduction was an Olympic sport, you’d be a record-breaker.

Follow Phoebe on Twitter @phoebeluckhurst

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