MARK SIMPSON .com

If you’ve been watching the noble Olympics in a slightly pervey way, treating all that lycra and fit young firm flesh on your HD screens as a form of illicit spornography then you deserve to be spanked soundly with a spiked running shoe.

But you’re not alone.

America’s prestigious NBC no less are doing it too.

With an online splurge of swim-boy nakedness called ‘Ab-Fab’ it asks you to ‘Guess the Swimmer’ - by identifying the headless topless torsos of selected Olympic totty.

In other words, it presents photos of top-flight swimmers as if they were headless naked profile pics on Manhunt or Gaydar. At the very least, it takes it for granted that you’ve been studying their bodies rather closely. They should really go the whole hog and provide a ‘MESSAGE ME!’ button to send those naughty athletes our phone numbers.

Someone with more morals than me might be inclined to huff and puff a little at this non-consensual spornographic exploitation of the golden swim-boys. But then, they are encouraging it, those devilish rascals, with their low-slung pants showing off their storm-proof ‘cum-gutters’ and saucy ‘come-hither’ pelvic tatts. They know exactly what kind of world we’re living in - and they seem determined to give it a semi.

And when you see NBC’s full-length pic of multi-Gold-medal-winner Phelps - the slim-hipped superstar whose seismic popularity might just overcome America’s deep-seated Speedophobia - you realise that, like so many young men today, he’s already practically stripping for Fratmen TV , even when he’s wearing jeans and underpants. (And why he deserves yet another Gold - for tarting.)

Meanwhile, two US National wrestlers have permanently lost their place on the team and their scholarships for actually doing just that.

Tip: D.A. Krolak

In the Middle Ages, sodomy was thought to be caused not by hair whorls, but by drunkeness.

As this spornographic clip shows, they were absolutely right.

The post-match beery bonding of the lovely lads of Sandbach RUFC - which, be warned, includes very male nudity, heavy petting and male-on-male snogging - made me feel faint with jealousy.

And also faintly redundant.

These straight lads’ eagerness to perform their manly love for one another in front of UK TV cameras (for an instalment of an ITV2 series last month called ‘Generation Xcess’) does away with the need for my:

• essay on hazing, in which I argued that male bonding is deeply homoerotic, but that despite this it is not a ‘gay’ thing - it’s a ‘guy’ thing

• pointing out the size queenery of straight men.

• explaining how little purchase the Phalliban has in the UK - compared to the US where it has a tighter grip than Captain Tim’s team-mates have on his ‘massive cock’

• arguing that homoerotic fantasy that Sporno advertising sells us is not entirely baseless

• responding to those who adamantly refuse to believe that straight men could get naked with one another on camera and play with each other’s dangly bits when offered lots of cash. (These ones did it for a few beers.)

Instead of all my scribbling, I just needed to take a video camera to a pub in Sandbach on Saturday night and buy a few rounds. It would have been a lot more fun too.

Funny that this should have surfaced around the same time as this spornographic ad campaign for Paris - which after the salty mantics of Sandbach RUFC now looks like a slightly coy promotion for a copycat programme featuring a less attractive, less ballsy team.

But perhaps the most ‘touching’ part of all this groping is the way this (highly successful) team of rugger buggers refuse to be embarrassed by the naughty clips the programme makers make them watch in the cold-sober light of day. Instead they seem quite proud. But then, they have much to be proud of. Especially their Captain.

Alas, I suspect that some - gay and straight - spiteful members of the Great British Public who saw the doc did their best to make these young men feel ashamed for being ‘gay’ with one another - to make them feel ashamed, in fact, for being fit, virile lads full of life, laughs, spunk and puppyish enthusiasm for masculinity. (Actually, the more I think about it, and what I’m missing, I’m beginning to feel spiteful too….)

Worse than this though is the way the clip ends before the programme does.

Anyone have the final segment? Or a better quality version?

As the completely unabashed grinning donkey-hung, bubble-butted Captain Tim says, ‘We should watch that again.’

Update: I’ve just been informed that a better quality clip is available, along with rather a lot of other athletes showing off their, er, sporting prowess, at the premium adult site: www.ruggerbugger.com

Ooo-la-la! The 2007 Dieux du Stade calendar is upon us and it seems to be even naughtier, even saucier - and somehow even more graphic - than last year’s. How do they do that? Without actually using those rugby balls as sex toys instead of just holding them that way?

Even I - even I - hesitate to reproduce some of the more explicit locker-room snaps - so you’ll have to visit the link for the full sauce. How long before sporno becomes just porno? (Oh, give it about a fortnight at this rate.)

And when it does, what on earth are gay men going to do with all their gay porn? When (mostly) hetero athletes photographed in blatantly, provocatively, deliriously homoerotic poses for mainstream consumption is hotter than anything Falcon can come up with, isn’t it going to be like when VHS was replaced by DVD? Sporno is in danger of making gay porn - and maybe even ‘gay sex’ - hideously obsolete, at least from where I’m staring.

After all ‘gays’ so obviously don’t own ‘gay sex’ any more - if they ever did. Sporno makes it eye-poppingly, horse-frighteningly apparent it’s no longer their private-members club (’have-you-been-to-a gay-bar-before?’) property. Now professional athletes pose for photos that should really be printed on their porn-movie box-cover - or saved for their ‘private pics’ on their Gaydar profile.

Soon all that will be left of ‘gay sex’ will be fisting in Continental leather bars. Sorry, my mistake, that’s not ‘gay’ either any more. That’s just the latest Bond movie.

And, truth be told, the ‘making of’ Dieux du Stade DVD has pretty much already found the boundary between sporno and gay porno and crashed through it. Scottish rugger bugger Sean Lamont reveals himself a ‘well rounded’, talented and very versatile sporno star - whichever way you look at him.

Not to be outdone in the sporting/spurting male stakes, Australia has muscled in on the sporno industry as well with the Naked Rugby League Calendar.

Perhaps the only surprising thing about this venture into out-of-the-closet sporno by Aussies is that it took them so long. After all, Australia is the country that brought us the Speedo and the Lifesaver, as well as Aussie Rules Football (I know it gets hot in Oz but really, is there any excuse for those skimpy, skimpy shorts and sleeveless tight vests other than showing off and generally being a tart?). Australia is also the country remember, with it’s extremely powerful, innovative sports media, that practically invented the drooling, extremely profitable commodification of the sporting male body and perhaps for that very reason is a global leader in metrosexuality.

So they must be extremely hacked off that they were outdone in the sporno stakes by the bleedin’ French. And also that Sean Lamont’s arse is even rounder and more inviting than the best barbied buttocks they can come up with (compare and contrast Scotland’s divinely geodesmic bum-cheeks with Australia’s March).

Lovely and eager to please as they are, the Oz sporno stars are though going to have to be a little less coy and show a little more in the way of vital assets if they want to keep up with Dieux du Stade. This shouldn’t be a problem: in my experience Australian men are anything but shy in real life - or reality TV. But then, perhaps Jamie Brooksby’s famous ‘metrosexual knob’ is the reason the Australian Rugby League pin-ups are hiding their tackle. Thanks to Jamie, Australian males are now held to very stretching standards indeed.

Sean Lamont however clearly isn’t worried. And who can blame him?

While beefy British rugby players may be lining up to tart themselves out to the public in French calendars, our home-grown sporno lags behind that of both France and Australia.

However, Nike’s use/exploitation of the England Rugby Squad in it’s advertising campaign for its tres gay stretchy top ‘Nike Pro’ is very encouraging indeed. Note how the muscled, glowering hunks have been photographed from a kneeling position - i.e. packet-level - lit from above, the better to show off their shoulders and pecs, as any gay porn director will tell you. The rugger gods themselves look down masterfully at the supplicant rugby fan, like Jeff Stryker at the greedy bottom servicing him. Perhaps the ‘Pro’ part of ‘Nike Pro’ stands for something other than ‘Professional’.

‘England’s secret weapon’, despite those baggy shorts, is not so secret after all. It’s spornographically obvious.

Now, if you think that, once again, my perverted, overheated brain is polluting with a filthy imputation to something as pure and unstained as England’s rugby shorts well, you’d probably be right.

But this doesn’t actually mean I’m wrong. Not just because advertising is, of course, never pure or unstained, but because of these eye-popping, shorts-straining pictures of what appears to be of a giant orange blow-up doll of Josh Lewsey (second from the right in the ‘Secret Weapon’ ad above - or one with the least secret packet and best six-pack) outside Twickenham Rugby Ground. And no, I didn’t take them myself: they appeared on the England Rugby Union official website.

Now we seem to be not just kneeling but grovelling on the floor gazing straight up at Josh’s powerful naked thighs and straight at his impressive (less baggy) packet. Plus he seems to have, very kindly, taken off his skin-tight Nike lycra top and is instead just wearing his skin-tight skin.

Naturally, it wasn’t officially a blow-up doll. As part of their campaign in the UK Nike commissioned a giant ‘bronze’ (plastic) statue of Josh Lewsey.

Much as I’d be happy to grovel for Josh, my favourite image however is this slightly less submissive perspectived one, snapped half-way through Josh’s bronze ‘erection’. Not only does he look more Greek, more Apollonian, it also looks as if he’s engaging in one of those charming post-match locker-room rugby games.

Just in time for the World Cup the July issue of the re-launched OUT features an essay by yours truly on the post-metrosexual pornolization of sport - or what I dub ’sporno’.  Here’s a (breathless) taster:

‘Sportsmen on this side of the Atlantic are increasingly openly acknowledging and flirting with their gay fans, a la David Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg (the man who actually looks the way Beckham thinks he looks). Both these thoroughbreds have posed for spreads in gay magazines and both have welcomed the attention of gay fans because they “have great taste”.  More than this, they and a whole new generation of young bucks, from twinky soccer players like Manchester United’s Alan Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo, to rougher prospects like Chelsea’s Joe Cole and AC Milan’s Kaka, keen to emulate their success, are actively pursuing sex-object status in a post-metrosexual, increasingly pornolized world.

In other words: they’re not just sports stars, but sporno stars’

And if you think sporno is just a faggy Euro phenomenon, then think again:

‘Why are Euro soccer stars Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg household names in the US, a country which has generally less interest in soccer than socialism? Because these sporno stars— athletic young hustlers who are happy to be ogled barely dressed on Times Square billboards and in Vanity Fair—advertise a willingness to put out, or at least get it out, to get ahead that is about as all-American as you can get.

‘Ljunberg’s Calvin Klein clad basket of giant Swedish meatballs is the dish everyone wants to dine on and he seems more than happy to feed us (god bless ‘im).  Or try a nice cool, creamy Beckham, recently hired as the new face off the long-running Got Milk? campaign. Want to grow up to be a sporno star? Make sure you drink your milk!’

The July issue of OUT - like the male sporting body - is on sale now.

You can read the full article here.