Millions of women across America may be asking themselves the same thing. And not just about the Sexy Slav. After his U.S. relay team won the semifinal on Friday, Jon Drummond ripped off his shirt and flexed for the crowd, leading Bob Costas to wonder if the runner had confused the Olympics with a Mr. America contest. And NBC cameras couldn’t get enough of the little tattoo suggestively located just above swimmer Tom Dolan’s Speedo line. ““The camera kept zooming in on him adjusting his tiny Spandex bathing suit and those tattoos,’’ says Michael Lafavore, a magazine editor who was watching that night with his wife and another couple. ““It drove the women wild.’’ Lafavore is the executive editor of Men’s Health, a monthly that devotes endless articles to ““killer abs’’ and ““powerful legs.''
Men are sex objects, as Calvin Klein’s underwear ads regularly remind us. The shameless ogling of the male form at the Centennial Studmuffin Olympiad is the final proof that women have permission to talk dirty about men in a way that men are no longer allowed to reciprocate. And there’s no better – or more legit – public forum for ogling than the Olympics. As Lafavore says, ““it’s like “Baywatch’ for women.’’ (Not to mention gay men.) Not coincidentally, NBC made a conscious effort this time around to target the Games at female viewers. The emphasis on ““stories’’ rather than scores was one way the network reached out to women. You know: all those ““up close and personal’’ bios of the athletes filmed in soft-focus slo-mo, with bare-chested gymnasts and near-naked divers exposing their sensitive side. Another crucial development is the ubiquity of Lycra as the fabric of choice among Olympians. Spandex shorts and bathing suits have the advantage of being both aerodynamically and anatomically correct.
Another thing Lycra reveals is the disturbing contrast between actual Olympians and the armchair variety. Tiffany Sonnenschein, a tan 22-year-old attending the Games, observes that U.S. decathlete Dan O’Brien has ““a really cute butt – and it looks great in his little black running shorts.’’ The swimmers are also big contenders for beefcake gold. ““They’ve got six-packs,’’ notes 20-year-old Amy Iannucci of Atlanta, alluding to the half-dozen abdominal muscles rippling above the skimpy suits worn by American Gary Hall Jr. and his Russian rival, Aleksandr Popov. Unfortunately for Tiffany and Amy, most of the guys they’re likely to encounter in real life don’t have Dan O’Brien bodies. Real men don’t have six-packs. They’ve got kegs.
