Are the Olympics the grandest stage of all for elite athletes, or a two-week festival of fornication and debauchery?

Sadly, it’s hard to tell and the recent Winter Games in Italy prove it.

The Milano Cortina organizers made international headlines when they ran out of free condoms for the athletes. The math is crazy. They started out with a stockpile of about 10,000 prophylactics; when you divide those among the 2,871 athletes, it should have been enough for roughly 3.5 condoms for every competitor over the entire 17-day event. Somehow, though, they ran out in just 72 hours, a burn-rate organizers chalked up to “higher-than-anticipated demand.” No kidding.

Mialitiana Clerc, an alpine skier for Madagascar, told reporters about the staggering rate of condom depletion at her accommodations. “There were a lot of boxes at the entrance of every building where we were staying and every day, everything had gone from the box,” she said. “I already know that a lot of people are using condoms, or giving them to their friends outside of the Olympics because it’s a kind of gift for them.”

Organizers worked out the logistics and had a fresh supply by Feb. 14. Mark Adams, a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, had a tongue-in-cheek response about the contraception update. “Clearly,” he said, “this shows Valentine’s Day is in full swing in the village.”

Should we be calling these “villages” anymore, though, or pop-up Sin Cities?

The contraception angle is a topic that inevitably resurfaces whenever the Olympics roll around. At the Summer Games in Paris back in 2024, organizers are said to have supplied athletes with 300,000 free condoms, but that’s nothing compared to the 450,000 that were handed out at the 2016 Olympics in Rio. The International Olympic Committee has been committed to this tradition for decades, going back to Seoul in 1988 where they distributed a modest 8,500 condoms as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Anecdotal Olympic stories of licentious behaviour, meanwhile, are legion and what happens at the Games doesn’t always stay at the Games. There are numerous reports, for example, of athletes and their amorous encounters with multiple partners and even public acts of coitus. Ryan Lochte, a 12-time Olympic medalist, one of the most decorated swimmers in American history, once told ESPN he believeg that around 70 to 75 per cent of Olympians engaged in sexual intercourse at the Games.

The legacy media writes off these hedonistic activities as men and women in their physical prime letting off pent-up energy, which is insulting because these aren’t irrational animals, these are human beings who are more than capable of self-control. Ultimately, this comes down to a lack of Christian virtue. Think about it: every athlete who makes it to this level possesses an incredible amount of discipline; they’re no strangers to physical sacrifices or overcoming various temptations while training, but all of a sudden, it’s OK to give in to sins of the flesh when they’re surrounded by lusty Olympians? You know the kind of answer you’ll get to that one from the culture, which is sad, because there’s more at stake here than winning and losing.

For perspective on the free contraceptives, here are a few thoughts from St. Thomas Aquinas in The Summa Contra Gentiles: “It is therefore clearly contrary to man’s good that the seed be emitted in such a way that generation cannot ensue: and if this be done deliberately it must needs be a sin.”

The Angelic Doctor of the Catholic Church expands on his point about the deplorable nature of any act where the emission of semen is intentionally frustrated from its natural procreative end, saying that “after the sin of murder, whereby human nature is deprived of actual existence, this kind of sin, whereby the generation of human nature is hindered, holds, seemingly, the second place.”

We also have the famous warning from St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians that fornicators will not inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9) That’s an excellent reminder for all would-be Olympians. Go for gold, sure, but aim higher and don’t forget the wages of sin are death and that podiums aren’t as important as storing up treasures in Heaven.