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In the days following his gold medal win at the 1998 winter games, Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati was stripped of his medal after testing positive for marijuana; questioned by Japanese police; given a standing ovation by a cafeteria full of international athletes; reinstated as an Olympic champion, and invited to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
But something else happened in the athletes' village in Nagano, Japan, that you may not have heard about.
"I had a little, I guess you could call it a sleepover, with someone I had known for a while," he said recently. "We'd always had girlfriends or boyfriends and then we both came to the Games single and after our events were over it was kind of like, 'Oh, we're both single.' It just sort of happened."
There are about 11,500 athletes currently competing at the Olympic Games in Beijing - 11,500 sweaty, hard-bodied men and women with good genes and tight spandex outfits. So it is no surprise that some competitors may be inclined to get to know one another away from the sports arenas.
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"There's a lot of sex going on," javelin thrower Breaux Greer told reporters after the Sydney Games in 2000.
"You get a lot of people who are in shape and, you know, testosterone's up and everybody's attracted to everybody."
There is a long tradition of Olympians getting closer, tighter, dirtier.
Track-and-field legend Bob Beamon said he did it the night before his historic 1968 Olympic long jump, in which he shattered the world record by almost two feet.
And not all the liaisons are over once the torch is extinguished.
Tennis legend Roger Federer, who will compete in Beijing, met his current girlfriend, Miroslava Vavrinec, at the Sydney Olympics, where she was also competing.
"A lot of people hook up during the Olympics," Mr. Rebagliati said. "Everybody's fit beyond belief and we're all definitely red-blooded humans that want to meet each other."
Helping orchestrate these connections is a special athletes-only Intranet system that allows competitors to check out each other's personalized pages and exchange messages.
In Nagano, Mr. Rebagliati received several admiring notes from members of the Italian ski team, followed by an awkward personal encounter involving lots of giggling and broken English.
"We were walking through the athlete's village and the Italian girls came over to me and said, 'So-and-so sent you an e-mail and she's over there and she really wants to meet you,' " he remembered. "It's like high school."
The buildup to the Olympics can be lonely, he said, as athletes break off contact with friends and family to focus on training, and tour competitive, gender-segregated circuits for years before qualifying for the Games.
The end of an Olympic event is a huge release of pressure, he said, and a good opportunity to let loose with other athletes.
"I know a lot of couples where one flies home to Canada, one flies home to Italy the next day," he said. "It's kind of like going to Las Vegas - what happens there stays there."
Of course, not every athlete is out to score something other than gold.
Bernard Luttmer, a sailor who competed in Athens in 2004, doesn't have a lot of "juicy stories."
"I found it very professional. I think people like to think of it as a big party, an orgy or whatever," he said. "But they're not really experienced partiers. People who have dedicated their whole lives to running, they have a couple drinks and they get a little bit crazy."
Some athletes also arrive at the Games with a partner in tow. Jamie Salé won Olympic gold at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002 with her partner, and now husband, David Pelletier.
"We'd already been dating for two years," she said. "They put you in university-style dorms and there's usually two single beds in the room, so that was kind of weird because we're used to sleeping together."
The duo pushed their beds together, she said, as did other couples they knew.
"I know that sounds kind of silly because you're in the same room, but just to reach over and hold his hand or touch him and make sure he's there, I needed that," she said.
But Ms. Salé said sex was not on her mind during the Olympics. She was nervous about the competition and found it difficult to sleep. That kind of pressure, she said, is not conducive to romantic thoughts.
"It's not really something you're thinking about whether you're with your husband or not," she said, laughing. "You save it for after."
But sex is obviously on the mind of some of the journalists covering the games.
Kerrin Lee-Gartner, who won a gold medal in downhill skiing at the 1992 Winter Games in France, found herself with an interesting reputation after a German tabloid reported that she and her husband, ski coach Max Gartner, had engaged in an intimate encounter before her race.
"That original article was totally National Enquirer-type stuff," Ms. Lee-Gartner said recently. "It was something along the lines of 'I awoke to a rustling under the cover at 6:52' and then there was a quote of Max saying, 'I know she couldn't work too hard because she had to conserve her energy.' "
But the story was completely manufactured.
The couple had decided to rent a condo outside the athletes' village to avoid distractions, and had run into a German reporter one night while walking to their private accommodations.
The reporter asked them if he could report that they had not stayed with the other athletes, should she win her event.
"And Max said in German - this was his quote and the only quote we gave from those Olympic games regarding us being together: 'If she wins, you can write whatever you want,' " she recalled.
The couple did not see the story the day it ran, but Ms. Lee-Gartner remembers a Swiss skier approaching her and making a comment about getting "hot and heavy."
She first read about the supposed tryst when she landed in Edmonton.
"I never gave a quote. I would never give a quote," she said. "As if."
But the story has stayed with her.
"Since '92, the men remember that I'm the girl who did it, and the women remember that my husband cried on CBC," she said. "If I was a Hollywood star I would have sued or something."
Ms. Lee-Gartner said that if sex was the secret to winning a gold medal, a lot more athletes would be working it into their pre-race routines.
But she, like most athletes at such an elite level, was too focused to think about anything other than reaching the podium.
"There's so much that goes into winning and I tried everything in my power," she said. "But I can actually say that I did not plan or schedule that into my Olympic schedule."
