No Sex, Please; We're Soccer Players

NATAL, BRAZIL—Next week will see the beginning matches in the 2014 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, and while everyone knows what #TeamBJ has in store for for their followers if either the USA, Brazil, England or Germany wins the World Cup, many of the poor soccer players themselves are in for a tough time, sexually speaking, as the playoffs get closer. "If a player can’t go one month or 20 days without having sexual relations, then they are not prepared to be a professional player," said Miguel Herrera, manager of the Mexican team. "Forty days of sexual abstinence isn’t going to hurt anybody." Herrera's philosophy is shared by several other team managers, including those from Spain, Germany and Chile. On the slightly brighter side is Bosnia/Herzogovina team manager Safet Susic, who's also banned his players from having sex during the games, but he's amenable to the players finding "another solution." "They can even masturbate if they want," Susic said. What a guy! However, Brazilian team manager Luiz Felipe Scolari has a tougher tightrope to walk, considering that prostitution is legal in Brazil, so how can he expect his team to avoid bed-bouncing altogether? Answer: He can't. "The players can have normal sex during the World Cup," Scolari stated, somewhat reluctantly, in April. "Usually normal sex is done in a balanced way, but there are certain forms, certain ways and others who do acrobatics. We will put limits and survey the players." We can't wait to hear that locker room discussion! The thing is, though, although coaches have, probably for centuries, warned their athletes to abstain from b.j.s and intercourse for some period before the "big game," turns out there's no scientific evidence to back up the idea that players don't play as well if they fuck before taking the field. "Coaches over the past four, five or six decades have stated that their players should not engage in sex before athletic events because it will weaken their performance, without any serious research to support that or any base of scientific theory to understand why that's wrong," said Tommy Boone, an exercise physiologist at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN, and author of Sex Before Athletic Competition: Myth or Fact. "There simply isn't anything in the medical literature to support abstinence." And Boone should know: In a 1995 study, he challenged 11 men to a treadmill test. "Some had sex 12 hours before the test. Some abstained," noted a Discovery News report. "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." On the other hand, Brazilian officials have apparently decided to lend those managers a hand with the abstinence approach. Over the past few weeks, police have closed down hotels where prostitutes see clients and nongovernmental organizations have stepped up their outreach to "at-risk" children, many of whom could be seen on the streets of the city offering sexual services to anyone who drives by. In fact, Natal has been known as a hot spot for sexual tourism for a long time. "Just five, 10 years ago, Natal used to receive 30 chartered flights—full of men—every weekend," said City Council member Julia Arruda, who serves on a commission to combat the sexual exploitation of children. "Things are much better now. But people are still taking advantage of our mostly young, impoverished citizens, and we know that there have also been networks of child prostitution for tourists.... That's why there have been coordinated projects between the 12 World Cup host cities." Indeed, sex workers in and around Rio de Janeiro—most notably in the city of Niterói, just across Guanabara Bay from Rio—were rousted by police in late May as the World Cup games drew near, and the workers report having been illegally arrested, robbed and some even raped by the cops, all to "tidy up Rio’s massive sex industry before the 2014 World Cup kicks off." Actually, the raids had started back in 2012, in anticipation of a United Nations conference in Rio. At that time, cops "raided a dozen luxury brothels popular with foreign tourists, including the one Justin Bieber famously visited last year," Julie Ruvolo of CityLab.com reported. "Both prostitutes and brothel managers were arrested in the sting, and police seized cash and condoms. Prosecutors brought charges of pimping, arms trafficking and sex trafficking against the raided brothels, but dropped them shortly after the conference concluded." Things are so bad, the Brazilian government even took offense to a couple of t-shirts offered by athletic shoe company Adidas, one of which read, "Lookin' to Score. Brazil," while another simply said, "I ♥ Brazil"—with the heart made of what appears to be a bikini bottom surrounding two ass cheeks. But after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff took to Twitter to denounce the shirts and declare that, "Brazil is happy to receive the tourists that will arrive for the World Cup, but is also ready to combat sexual tourism," Adidas took the shirts off the market. But take heart (no pun intended), soccer stars: All you'll have to do is officially follow Sara Jay or Siri on Twitter, go out there and win a trophy, then line up with the rest of their followers for your free b.j.s!