by JAMES S. KIM
The 2014 Incheon Asian Games officially kicked off last Friday, and while athletes are competing on the pitch, court or whatever their field of play is, they are also apparently getting down to business in the privacy of the Athlete’s Village.
“We’ve been handing out condoms over the past three days but their daily ration of 5,000 runs out quickly every day,” Choi Hyeung-dae, a games organizing committee official, told AFP.
Athletes hooking up at international sports events is nothing new, but Choi seems to believe athletes are snapping up condoms for a different purpose.
“This does not mean that athletes have already been engaged in bed-hopping. I think most of them just want to keep [the condoms] as souvenirs,” he said, adding that some athletes may be mistaking the condoms for badges or other mementos since the condoms are packaged in gold wrappers with the game emblem adorning them.
With that said, there’s been plenty of “condom collecting” throughout international sporting history. Organizers at the 1988 Seoul Olympics handed out 8,500 condoms, then 50,000 condoms at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Twenty years later, athletes “collected” nearly 150,000 condoms at the 2012 London Olympics.
