Reid About It

The Vancouver Olympics have finally ended, bringing us tears, joy, and a giant beaver.

Yeah, there's always that.

Anyway, while we return to our regularly scheduled television viewing, one thing stands out about this year's games. There's one number that shines past Canada's 14 gold medals, or the USA's 37 medals, or even the 190 million viewers NBC pulled in.

Vancouver gave out 100,000 condoms to participants in this year's games.

A hundred thousand. Sex of...well, Olympic proportions.

As the article points out, that averages out to more than 15 condoms for each man and woman at the games.

While on the surface, that seems like an awful lot of doin' the nasty, I think it's about right. The Olympic Village has long been thought of as a place where pretty much anything goes for the athletes.

Face it, there is no other point in the space-time continuum where a guy who does the luge is going to get groupies. A biathlon athlete never pulls in the babes like a rock star, except for that brief moment that only occurs every four years.

Most of the athletes aren't professionals. By that, I'm not saying they're college athletes waiting on their big break to turn pro. I'm saying they train all of their lives to come curling at the Olympics, then they go home. They go for gold, then they go back to picking up the kids from school and putting cover sheets on their TPS reports.

There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for most of these athletes. They're here to march in the opening ceremonies, perform their sport on MSNBC at two in the afternoon, and take advantage of free condoms for the first time in their lives.

It's really just the natural tradition of the original games being handed down. Remember, the ancient Greeks competed and weren't even wearing pants.