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Volume CCXXXIV, Number 48    August, 2004      

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MEDIA GOES FOR GOLD WITH MORE OLYMPIC EXPOSURE

Newspapers, magazines and TV are all mining Olympic gold with endless photo spreads and packages of sexy Olympians like Russian mud wrestler Shtupela Alova (left) and California greased-volleyball star Roundi Heals (right)

By Charles Van Doren
Media Editor

The Athens Olympics – the greatest collection of brain-dead jocks outside of a USC fraternity party – opens this week, and the media is "going for the gold" with more Olympics exposure than ever before.

As hundreds of California beach bunnies qualify for newly-added Olympic events such as beach volleyball, surfing and mayonnaise wrestling, the media realizes that there's plenty of gold to be had in exposing as much of their young, tanned flesh as permitted under the FCC's rigorous Janet Jackson rule.

As is well known to communications lawyers, the Jackson Rule holds that any form of nudity, sexual violence or soft-core pornography is permissible on television at any hour of the day or night as long as there is no nip and no George W., thereby making sure that broadcast television does not traduce traditional American values like ogling, double entendres and a permanently adolescent approach to human sexuality.

"Twenty years ago, female jocks would expose maybe 80% of their bodies.  Even at the last Olympic games in Sydney, exposure levels averaged 90%, except for the U.S. Women's Soccer Team," explained NBC executive Flash Pedlar.  "This year, some of the babes have reached 95% exposed skin, or close to the theoretical maximum."

"We dropped a billion dollars on a bunch of jocks running around in their underwear.  If we can't get men to sit like zombies in front of the tube with their hands in their pants, we're dead meat,"  Pedlar noted.

Representatives of the print media were more circumspect.  Explaining the decision of the normally staid New York Times to devote its front page to lip-smacking coverage of hardbody girls in tiny bikinis, Managing Editor Jill Abramson said:  "This was a story of great social import.  It's a trend story.  It's a style piece.  We don't do smut at the Times, although thank goodness we'll take photos from anyone who does."

 Initial reaction from the target audience has been generally favorable.  "Sure I like it," said Jimmy Burke of Old Sludgebury.  "Now if they would just lose the bikini tops we'd really have something here!"

His cousin Larry Burke echoed these views: "Fuckin'-A!"  After a pause he added reflectively, "And I like the way they look all oiled up in the photos."

The increased exposure of young female Olympic flesh is only the latest example of cutting-edge mores pioneered by the Olympic movement. In 1936, it furthered the cause of world peace by allowing Adolf Hitler to turn the Berlin Olympics into a Nazi rally, thanks to home-grown fascists like U.S. Olympic Committee Führer Avery Brundage.

A generation later, the selfsame Avery Brundage refused to cancel or even delay the Munich Olympics just because nine Israeli athletes had been murdered in a terrorist attack.  Later, under the thumb of his protégé and Franco coatholder Juan Samaranch, the Olympics became synonymous with corruption and cronyism.

But true to the Olympic ideal of higher, stronger, hornier, Pedlar promised even more exposure at the 2008 Olympic Games on Venice Beach. [Confirm site – Copy Ed.] [Well, it should be.  The babes there are hot. – Sports Ed.]  "Next time, we have to make sure that bikini trampolining is an Olympic event," mused Pedlar.  "I don't know how we missed that one."