There’s nothing sporting about sordid conduct at the Olympics

Athletes are there to compete, not to enhance their earnings potential from sexual provocation

What would Baron Pierre de Coubertin have had to say about Alysha Newman? 
He was the founder of the modern Olympics, whose ideals for the Games were that: “the important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.” She is the Canadian pole-vaulter who celebrated winning bronze at the Stade de France by twerking – twerks being sexual gyrations – at her audience. 
The BBC commentator who observed austerely: “I’m not sure about that” spoke, I fancy, for the shade of Baron Pierre. Granted Alysha had just vaulted 4.85 metres, so she was entitled to show off, but she could have turned cartwheels, no?The gold medal winner, Australian Nina Kennedy, wept for joy but somehow managed not to repel half the audience in the process of sporting celebration. 
Was it just light-hearted fun, a bout of exuberance? Alysha is one of several Olympics athletes to have an OnlyFans account, an online sexual site – I would say “adult” but there’s nothing adult about it – where presumably twerking is part of the deal. Subscribers pay £10 a month for her reflections on life, and her performance at the Stade de France has no doubt usefully boosted business on her account. But isn’t it an undignified way to celebrate an extraordinary achievement? 
There she is, representing Canada to the world, and what she gives the world is an OnlyFans taster. Poor old Baron Pierre nursed the notion that the Olympic Games could promote peace and mutual understanding between nations; it’s safe to assume that he never envisaged this.
Look, we all know that Olympic athletes are almost all blessed with beautiful bodies, if a bit on the lean and muscular side. Their physical perfection is part of the deal; and that’s very much in the spirit of the original Greeks. But for the athletes themselves to diminish their achievement by playing up to the sexual fantasies of part of the audience is to take away from the dignity of the Games. 
The athletes trained unimaginably hard, exercised colossal self discipline, and for what? To titillate the internet? Alyshah’s antics don’t just diminish her own standing but that of other athletes.
She may well argue that her OnlyFans site is a useful means of bolstering her income. Indeed she’s not alone in using the site; Tom Daley’s diving partner, Noah Williams, and Jack Laugher, another springboard athlete, post images there. What’s on offer across the site ranges from fully clothed images to sexually explicit content. It’s limited to over-18s. And while some of the sports people who use it may see it as no more problematic than the other sponsorship deals that most top athletes take up, those deals aren’t sordid in the way sex-related sites are.
People venerate the Olympics. It started out as a religious festival, with athletes competing not just for their own glory but that of their state and something of that spirit still invests the modern Games, thanks to Baron Pierre. He insisted that the Games should be for amateurs – so, not a means of making money – but he acknowledged that participants, especially poorer ones, might need compensation for the earnings they would lose by taking part. Easing the financial burden upon athletes was intended to redirect focus onto the sport, not allow contestants to enhance their earnings potential from sexual provocation.
Alysha Newman has surely set a really bad example to little girls who want to be like her. She can still apologise to her hosts and her teammates. Perhaps she should.