Not Just Sex: 3 Of The Most Famous Olympic Games Love Stories

With the Olympics on the horizon, we would like to congratulate Quartz for being the first Google result for 'how many condoms in the Olympic Village'. The answer, by the way, is 450,000. This, our Quartz overlords tell us, would allow each athlete have sex 84 times.

There is, every four years, an odd fascination with the number of prophylactics dished out, as we have all since realised the true spirit of the Olympic Village. The Games owe their name to the Greek sanctuary of Olympia, whose name came from Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Ancient Greece.

Ahead of the London Games four years ago, ESPN magazine revealed the village for what it was: a great, steaming den of iniquity, as athletes spend much of their free time after competition living up to the 'mount' part of the founding Olympic ideal:

Suddenly they're released into a cocoon where prying reporters and overprotective parents aren't allowed. Pre-competition testosterone is running high. Many Olympians are in tapering mode, full of excess energy because they're maintaining a training diet of up to 9,000 calories per day while not actually training as hard.

There are some remarkable details in the ESPN piece (one javelin competitor had sex with three women a day in order to stay relaxed), and it quoted American swimmer Ryan Lochte as saying that "my last Olympics, I had a girlfriend — big mistake. Now I’m single, so London should be really good. I’m excited".

Despite the fact that many of the athletes play it fast and loose, the Village has proved to be an important staging point in some of the most famous sporting love stories ever told.

The Irish tale

Plenty of Irish Olympic athletes have met and fallen in love over a shared Olympic experience, including Derval O'Rourke and Peter O'Leary, Rob and Marian Heffernan and Sam Lynch and Sinead Jennings, who were recently the subject of a fantastic profile by Paul Kimmage in the Sunday Independent. One stands out above all others, however:

Michelle Smith and Erik De Bruin

Michelle Smith met Dutch discus thrower Erik De Bruin in Barcelona in 1993, and their relationship was a major talking point surrounding the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. De Bruin was suspended during those Games, having failed a drugs test in 1993. Sonia O'Sullivan pondered how important their meeting proved in her Irish Times column last week:

...I do wonder now if Michelle would like to do the same thing with her life script for 1996.
I wonder as well about where we were both coming from, having being first linked as Olympians in Barcelona in 1992, before taking very separate paths.

Barcelona was one of the first athletes villages set up to be a very communal and interactive place. I recall seeing Michelle there a few times, after causing barely a ripple in the pool, enjoying the social side of the Olympics, along with Erik de Bruin, a discus thrower from the Netherlands, whom she had befriended.

None of us could have imagined then that this Dutch track and field athlete would have such an impact on Irish swimming four years later in Atlanta.

Love Conquers All

Harold Connolly and Olga Fikotova-Connolly

Harold Connolly won gold for the United States in the hammer throw at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. At the Games, he began a relationship with Olga Fikotova of the Czechoslovakia, who won gold at the discus.

Olga describes their meeting in her book, the Rings of Destiny:

But somehow fate brought us together, and we found that although we were from opposite or far away corners of the world, and definitely from political systems that seemed to be completely incompatible, that when it came to basic human values and observations, we were extremely similar. We were trying to converse in my very fragmented English, and his fragmented German, because he'd travelled in Germany before. We were kind of putting together ideas and views and we were surprisingly close together. From that developed, besides curiosity and friendship, also a feeling of love.

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Their relationship soon became another staging ground for the Cold War, as the couple's repeated requests to marry were turned down. She was denounced in Czechoslovakia as a traitor for wishing to marry an American, so Connolly ultimately appealed to the U.S. State Department for assistance.

The saga was covered widely by the Western media, and ultimately the couple married in Prague in 1957 following a personal appeal to the Czech president. 30,000 people turned up to the public ceremony. The couple then moved to the United States, and Fikotova was denied the opportunity to continue competing for Czechoslovakia. This was a directive against her wishes, but the relevant authorities in Czechoslovakia spread word that she had reected the opportunity to continue competing for her home nation, and instead wished to represent the U.S.

Despite that not being her initial desire, Fikotova competed for the U.S. in the Olympics until in 1960, 1964 and 1968, and carried the American flag at the 1972 games.

The couple divorced in 1974.

The One Which Fell Apart

Marion Jones and C.J. Hunter

Unlike the above, the marriage of Jones and Hunter did not begin at the Olympic games, but instead the Games saw the point at which it began to unravel.

Jones and Hunter met at North Carolina University while the latter was a coach. Hunter resigned from the University as a result of rules governing coach-athlete relationships, and they married in 1998. Two years later, both travelled to compete at the Olympics in Sydney: Jones as a sprinter and Hunter in the shot-put, before Hunter as forced to withdraw through injury. He was allowed to remain on at the Games as Jones' coach.

It later emerged that Hunter had failed doping tests prior to the Olympics, and was forced to give up his coaching credentials. Jones won three gold and two bronze at the games before being implicated along with her husband in the infamous BALCO case.

The couple divorced in 2002, with Jones writing two years later that her husband's testing positive tarnished her image as a clean athlete and ultimately damaged their marriage.