Sex and World Cup players

Jun 18, 2010

At the ongoing World Cup in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, England and USA have allowed their teams to have sex but with conditions. Argentineans can only have it with their usual partners, Brazilians and the US on off match days, and England players have been told once after each game.

At the ongoing World Cup in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, England and USA have allowed their teams to have sex but with conditions. Argentineans can only have it with their usual partners, Brazilians and the US on off match days, and England players have been told once after each game.

Their women cannot stay overnight and the coach will be monitoring their rooms through TV scans. England manager Fabio Capello, wants to avoid a repeat of 2006, when Britain’s tabloids were filled with wild stories about players and women throughout the World Cup in Germany.

However, the Chile team is not allowed sex, or to use Twitter, use the Internet at night or talk to the press. The Ghanaian Black Stars, will not be allowed sex at all throughout the period they will be playing, although they can receive their wives or girlfriends or relatives after a game. On match nights, visitors are allowed but only in public places, till the time the players to go to bed.

The argument about sex before games surfaces every time there is a tournament. And there is no agreement on whether athletes should abstain from sex — or not.

Former Brazilian soccer star Romario, told journalists that he felt different whenever he had sex before a game. “I feel lighter, my legs are more nimble. If I don’t have sex on the day before a game, something will be missing.”

His fellow player at the 1994 Word Cup, Branco, said sex was important in Brazil winning the 1994. “My son Stefano was conceived during the 1994 World Cup when I spent a day off in San Francisco with my wife,” he said. “Sex is good for you. It relieves tension. We hadn’t won the World Cup for 24 years so it didn’t do us any harm. What you cannot do is stay in a brothel until 4:00am.”

India coach Gary Kirsten encouraged his players to have sex. “Go ahead and indulge,” he wrote in the Hindustan Times, and even advocated ‘going solo’ if no partner was available.

“Having sex increases testosterone levels, which causes an increase in strength, aggression and competitiveness,” he wrote. “Conversely, not having sex for a few months causes a significant drop.”

However, Muhammad Ali acknowledged recently, he would abstain from sex for six to eight weeks prior to any championship fight.

“The key to all this is the context in which the sex occurs,” said Prof. Barry Komisaruk, a psychology professor at Rutgers, who has studied the effects of sex on the human brain. “If it’s with booze, late nights and getting hooked on some woman or wondering if she loves you, then yeah, that could be very deleterious.”

Tommy Boone, an exercise physiologist at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, US, wrote a book, Sex Before Athletic Competition: Myth or Fact, saying there isn’t anything in medical literature to support abstinence for better performance.

Boone carried out several studies that looked at how sex might alter performance on the playing field. In a 1995 study, he challenged 11 men to a treadmill test. Some had sex 12 hours before the test. Some abstained, the results, published in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, showed no difference between the groups in how much oxygen their hearts needed or how efficiently their bodies used oxygen.

“A man’s body goes through some physical changes during sex,” he said. These include a rise in heart rate from 70 beats per minute at rest to up to 130 beats per minute. His blood pressure also goes up. And with more muscle contractions, his body uses more oxygen than it would if he were watching TV.

But compared to the exertion required during a World Cup soccer game, Boone said, sex requires less than 25% of the aerobic effort. And it lasts for much less time.

There’s no way that a quick romp under the covers could sap an athlete’s energy to make a difference in his game.

In 2000, Dr. Ian Shrier, former president of the Canadian Academy of Sports Medicine and an investigator at McGill’s Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Community Studies, wrote in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine that there is no psychological evidence that sex helps or hinders performance. And although there hasn’t been significant research done on the psychological effects of pre-performance sex, Shrier said he believes an absence or abundance of sex could affect an athlete’s attention and thus his performance.

“If sex is a distraction and causes one to lose focus, then it could be good for those who are too focused and bad for those who are not focused enough,” he said. “So, it could then be used as any other psychological technique to achieve optimal focus.”

Boone agrees. “If you take an athlete who has been engaged in sexual activity for years and then tell him to suddenly abstain, that’s much more disruptive to the human body than going out drinking all night and trying to compete the next day,” he said.

As far as psychology goes, Boone says sex might actually increase a player’s on-field performance because of sex’s ability to decrease stress, increase self-esteem and improve self body image.

“You’re not going to get some athlete achieving maximum performance if he is loaded down with stress,” Boone said. “The release that is associated with a heightened state of arousal sets the stage for better psychological preparation, be it in a business deal or at an athletic event.”

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