No, Boner Rower Does Not Have A Boner: A Gay Man's Remedial Guide To Penises For Straight Guys [Olympic Dong]

Fact: the average straight person has sex about once every four years. (Except for 43-year-old divorced dads in New York City, who are having sex with every 26-year-old lady, all the time.) Fact: the average straight man has seen about 3.2 penises in his life.

What's more, most straight people have sex with the lights out and are afraid to look at all the freaky unique junk that people have. This is why, when suddenly there are a bunch of dudes parading around in tight rowing shorts that show off their business to any extent, straight people who blog for a living and have barely seen any dicks in their lives are all like: "Haha, everyone point and laugh at the dude with an Olympic medal and a boner!"

Yeah, that is not a "boner." Cock—most of you poor people haven't had a chance to learn, so let a gay dude tell you—comes in all shapes and sizes, and when I say all, I mean ALL. (As anyone who's watched Roger Federer closely can attest.) And all the various penis sizes are good and OK. It's one of the great mysteries of life why dicks (and labia too, lest we forget!) are so unlike one another and special. The jury is still out on what this all means, but the long and short of it is that different dicks present themselves differently. And dicks are so different.

Thankfully we have lived recently in an age of baggy pants where it doesn't matter if we "dress to the left" or not—but with fashion's tightening and shortening of inseams over the last 20 years, we are being exposed more and more to male uniqueness every day on the street and in our workplaces. We are about three decades out from fashion making us wear, like, transparent codpieces to the office. That'll be weird. At first.

For now, there's athletic gear, which is the next best thing. When you are in a freaky synthetic-material athletic singlet with basically zero-inseam, created by the fine people at Boathouse Sports out of polypropylene, there are not a lot of places for your dick to go. It's up or over—or it's really uncomfortable. If you sit down in one of these outfits, guess what happens? Yup, it's the opposite of the auto-tuck. Particularly when you are stuffed in a scull.

I trained in rowing where the Dartmouth and U.S. Naval Academy and some Olympians do their winter training. As a crappy amateur, I learned that even rest position in rowing is one of the most uncomfortable positions in the world. The one thing that is not happening when you row—as you move from the beginning of the drive, with bent knees at your chest with your arms straight forward, to the reclined position of release—is that, with your legs doing all this work, you are not thinking about where your junk goes. If you do have time to think about it, this is only because it is getting mangled somewhere. If you're a pro rower, you're used to your dick just being wherever it's not in the way; you don't think twice about that. You're BUSY.

Couple that with the facts that the whole "grower/shower" dichotomy is not a myth, and statistical diversity is a strange and magical thing. In short, there is a whole lot of huge flaccid dick out there, as our pal on the podium can attest. If our Harvard buddy Henrik Rummel had indeed had a "boner," as you kids call it, you'd have seen a somewhat more rectangular shape anyway: while the corpora cavernosa are somewhat rounded "cylinders" on their own, together their overall erect impression is more squared off. This is clearly rounded. This is not the shape of a penis that's pumped full of blood.

And let's all raise a toast to Henrik: who among us would have been able to resist an adjustment? Which would have made for the most embarrassing photo and video ever. ("SCANDAL: HARVARD MAN FONDLES JUNK AT MEDAL CEREMONY.")

Besides, the whole big flaccid package makes sense, because he obviously has huge balls too.

Choire Sicha is Deadspin's super homo water volleyball correspondent and the co-proprietor of The Awl.

Photo via Flickr user The Kozy Shack.

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That's Not A Boner, Says Boner Rower [Olympic Dong]

Aug 7, 2012 9:40 AM  

Over the weekend, the American team took bronze in the men's coxless four rowing event. But at the medal ceremony, you could be forgiven for ignoring the first- and second-place teams, and indeed three-fourths of the U.S. team. Instead, all eyes were on Henrik Rummel. (Rummel and his penis are second from left in the above photo.)

Even Gawker got in on the action, declaring Rummel a gold medalist in "having a boner while wearing short shorts," which I believe is a demonstration sport and will receive full status at the Rio de Janeiro games. But Rummel himself would like to set the record straight.

"This is me and I swear it's not erect!" Rummel wrote in the comments of a Reddit post of the photo. "I don't know why it ended up in that position but there you go."

Rummel followed up with (above-the-waist) photo proof that it was him, so I guess we're forced to take him at his word that he was at least semi-flaccid. Which means stop bragging, you world-class athlete and Olympic medalist with a giant bulge.

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Hours After Defeat, An Australian Rower Was Smashing Store Windows: Foreign Olympics News That Couldn't Fit On The Desk Of Bob Costas [Zooming In]

Deadspin and Gelf Magazine bring you the best (or at least the most interesting) foreign-produced journalism about the London Olympics.

After a disappointing sixth-place finish in the men's rowing final, Australian coach Andrew Matheson (who apparently knows his players quite well) took his team aside and warned them not to completely let loose now that the racing schedule had concluded.

The Age reports that the warning did not work, as the team went out drinking in the village of Egham (near the Lake Dorney Olympic rowing venue), and 21-year-old-rower Josh Booth allegedly destroyed two storefront windows. He was subsequently arrested by London Police at 1:40 am. After being taken to the station, he fainted (whether from shock or as a euphemism for "passed out drunkenly" isn't clear) and hit his head on something in the Egham police station. He spent the rest of the night in the hospital. Rowing Australia CEO Andrew Dee is withholding his comment on the incident until he is fully aware of the details.

In response to that incident, and to cyclist (and British Olympic hero) Bradley Wiggins announcing on Twitter that he was "blind drunk," IOC spokesman Mark Adams released a statement suggesting that athletes "drink wisely."

It's never good to be accused of embarrassing your country in front of the whole world and "[hogging] all the limelight," but those are the allegations against Olympic ceremony crasher Madhura Nagendra from chef-de-mission of India's Olympic delegation, Muralidharan Raja, according to the Agence France-Presse.

Nagendra caused quite the stir when she strolled up beside Indian team's flag bearer in her out-of-place red top during the opening ceremony.

She was one of 7,5000 volunteers taking part in the opening ceremony, when Olympic spirit got the best of her and she made an "error of judgment."

"I'm a proud woman of India and I was taken aback seeing all the comments. I hope this will be forgiven," she added.

India, however, is still hung up on the incident. Several people have taken to Twitter to vent about this injustice while, inevitably, someone has even created a Facebook page about Nagendra "dropping in" on other important events around the world.

According to Vanguard, the Nigerian government has allocated 2 billion naira ($12.4 million USD) for the country's Olympic team, but one "official who begged for anonymity" said the funds were released far too late to truly help the Nigerian team.

The official claims that the funds were turned over to the team at the last minute, rendering them effectively useless as they could not be used for the training or improvement of Nigerian athletes. The official also believes that releasing the funds so late greatly increases the likelihood of corruption, as the money can more easily be used for things that have nothing to do with Nigeria's Olympic team.

So why is the Olympic team receiving its money now rather than, say, four years ago, when it could have been used for the training of athletes? The problem rests with Nigeria's bureaucracy, which makes it very difficult for money to be allocated and spent quickly. The process of approving and implementing funds is so arduous that the Nigerian National Sports Commission actually had to borrow money in order to compete in some Olympic qualifying events, even though it now has more money than it needs with the release of this latest round of funds.

The anonymous official hopes to convince Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan to restructure the funding process for the Nigerian Olympic team.

As recently as the 1996 Olympics, the French swim team was more of a laughing stock than the powerhouse it is today. After the debacle in Atlanta—in which no French swimmer brought back a medal of any color—Claude Fauquet, the swim team's technical director, overhauled the entire system.

No longer were local swim clubs allowed to send their champions to regional meets; instead swimmers had to meet rigorous qualifying standards to have the opportunity to advance.

That severely limited the pool(!) of athletes, but those who made it through were battle tested and prepared, and the entire culture of the sport has been refocused on beating specific times.

In an article in France24.com, Tresor Kibangula explains how the now-revered Fauquet method has produced impressive results, including at least six French swimming medals in the last three Olympics.

The French stars of these games, 22-year-old Camille Muffat who set a new Olympic record in the 400m freestyle, and 20-year-old Yannick Agnel who powered past Ryan Lochte to help the French get revenge in the 4 x 100m freestyle, both started their careers at the Olympic Nice Natation training centre, one of the government-subsidized swim clubs to first adopt the Fauquet method.

In 1972, Anatoly Bondarchuk won a gold medal in the hammer throw. Four years later, he won a bronze in the same event while at the same time serving as coach to Yuriy Sedykh, his countryman and the eventual gold medal winner.

Bondarchuk's Wikipedia article says he's "regarded as the most accomplished hammer throw coach of all time," and we are not in a position to disagree. He has been awarded both The Order of the Badge of Honour and Order of the Red Banner of Labour, which both sound very prestigious and very, very Soviet.

Bondarchuk has coached athletes to medals in five different Olympic games, and has a PhD in pedagogical science (education, broadly speaking). He wrote this well-regarded book about athletic training and performance.

And now, for reasons the locals don't entirely understand, he's landed in Kamloops, British Columbia, where he's been coaching shot putter Dylan Armstrong. He applied for what the Globe and Mail describes as a "lowly assistant track and field coach [position]." What did the aforementioned locals think? "They thought it might have been a joke or a different Anatoly Bondarchuk."

As it turns out, aside from wanting to be closer to his daughter in Calgary, Bondarchuk had heard of Dylan Armstrong. At the time, the mountainous Armstrong was struggling as a young hammer thrower, laden with potential but unable to make the leap to the elite level. Bondarchuk switched him to shot put and started coaching him in "limited English." Canada's Athletics head coach Mike Gardiner said of the communication between Armstrong and Bondarchuk, "It was a series of hand movements and looks and single-syllable words. And everything seemed to work out. It was a code they were using, there's no doubt." Bondarchuk also has some unusual training methods: the coach has suspended a medicine ball against the ceiling and has Armstrong bat at it like a tetherball, and Bondarchuk has Armstrong and the other athletes he coaches throwing weight plates around. Those techniques don't generally make it into other Olympians' regimens.

This morning, after a close call that included a foul and one less-than-stellar attempt, Armstrong gathered himself and qualified for the shot put finals.

Kate Bennert, Isaac Rauch, Dan Gartland, David Goldenberg, and Tom Ley contributed to this article.

Gelf Magazine, the purveyor of fine NYC-based events including the Varsity Letters speaking series, has been looking over the overlooked since 2005.

For a handy master schedule of every Olympic event, click here.

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