I remember someone describing the event on the Black Rock Playa in Nevada called “Burning Man” as an example of the carnivalesque, what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ambition to “uncover, undermine - even destroy, the hegemony of any ideology that seeks to have the final word about the world, and also to renew, to shed light upon life, the meanings it harbours, to elucidate potentials; projecting, as it does an alternate conceptualisation of reality.” When we are confronted with spaces of carnival, like Burning Man or Renaissance Fair, we also think of its temporary nature, the Temporary Autonomous Zone of Hakim Bey, and its ability to redirect revolutionary and counter-revolutionary impulses into impulses of the body.

It appears that Olympians know this all too well. The Olympic Village, the social space for all of the world’s athletes competing in both summer and winter games, also operates as an autonomous zone.
Imagine the world’s toughest athletes who are not only representatives of their sport or country but of the human form all in a space the size of a city block-- approximately ten thousand of the most fit and excellent people drinking, socializing, gazing, and competing with one another. They are also stimulated by their body’s natural chemical production.

Sex at the Olympics has, in the past, been frowned upon. It was believed that sex reduces an athlete’s ability to run, jump, or lift. But this notion has also been revised.

Even at the Salt Lake City Games, where the Mormon city council was disturbed by the events that transpired at their Olympic village, 250,000 condoms where given to the competitors.

So, the Olympics have been reduced to a small number of true Olympians and a larger majority of "athletic tourists", establishing a haven of glycogen fueled sexual fervor all bent on fucking. But, then again, it's sponsored.

It's also insightful when one thinks about the conditions that govern an event like the Olympic Village and an event like Burning Man. What sort of insight do these athletes achieve when they accomplish what so few of us can accomplish and then screw it all away? I would like to think that the world, at its lowest common denominator, could be like the Olympic Village: a pure, blind fuck-fest. At its best, like Burning Man: insight into the nature of humanity, love for others and the self, and a lucid, transcendent fuck-fest.