I SHALL be spending an awful lot of the next fortnight looking at near-perfect, near-naked bodies. I can’t say that this is a prospect that fills me with dismay. The 16 days of the Olympic Games are a prolonged feast of many different things, and one of the incidental and totally unavoidable matters is prolonged exposure to the most dramatic forms of physical beauty that the human frame can come up with.

And beauty of this youthful and unthinkingly physical kind cannot fail to have about it a whiff of the erotic. It is not that the Games are about eroticism. They are about winning and losing, just as a Bloody Mary is about vodka and tomato juice. But all the same, there is a lot more about a good Bloody Mary than those two ingredients. The Olympic Games cannot escape and does not wish to escape that special tingle on the lips that is provided by a subtle shake of the Tabasco of sex.

Let us take Svetlana Khorkina. She is a Russian gymnast and a diva of the tenth dan. At 5ft 5in, she is a giant in the land of pixies. With her build, with her nature, gymnastics becomes an all-or-nothing venture. She lacks the advantages of the midgets, who can somersault almost without leaving the ground. Khorkina has no margin for error: her height exaggerates every small imperfection. But when she pulls off a move, her build and her nature give her a languorous grace and startling perfection that the four-foot-tenners can’t begin to dream of.

Her routines on the asymmetric bars brought her gold medals in Atlanta and Sydney, and might again here in Athens. They are not consciously sexy. Khorkina is not a horizontal pole dancer, and when she hits perfection the response is not “Phwoar, wouldn’t mind a bit of that”. She provides delight of a very high order, but the delight is the more resonant for that shake of Tabasco. You don’t say “Phwoar” when you look at The Birth of Venus but it is a painting with a hefty shake of Tabasco nonetheless. Khorkina on the bars is no less beautiful.

Now 25 and perfectly respectable, she is not an erotic figure but a performer about whom some measure of eroticism is inescapable. She excels in a sport that has tended to favour breastless prepubescents, the Olympic sport that gets the highest viewing figures of all in the United States. Khorkina went so far as to pose naked for Russian Playboy, in order, she said, to prove that there were real women in women’s gymnastics. No one who has seen the pictures will deny that she made her point.

However, she drew the line when a Japanese billionaire offered her a million dollars to perform her floor and beam routines naked. Perhaps she saw that the billionaire had missed the point. Sport at this level is not provocative, still less pornographic. It is erotic, not in the manner of a dirty movie, but in the manner of a piece of art.

If the difference between art and dirty pictures is the artist, as they said in Calendar Girls, then at the Olympic Games the artist is the athlete. Or perhaps the Games themselves. The physical perfection is not there to titillate: the bouncy muscles and lithe limbs are cultivated not for your delectation but to make their possessor go faster, higher, stronger.

But that doesn’t mean that the world will ignore the beauty and its subtle erotic charge. That just makes the pleasure all the richer for the billion or so who will watch. Patriotism, excitement, hero-worship, heroine-worship, the agonies of victory, the ecstasy of winning, pain, relief, disaster, effort, elation, despair: all these things are part of the Olympic Games, along with the soap-opera charms of the manystranded unwinding narrative. But in the background, by no means the principal part of the thing, there is that ineluctable lick of Tabasco. Forget all the tawdry voyeurism of Big Brother and the like, where the sex is thrust into your face. The Olympic Games is ten times more erotic.

It has always been that way. The ancient Olympic Games went in for the ultimate high-tech, figure-hugging fabric known as skin. No sweat-wicking microfibres, no patriotic colours, no daringly skimpy cutting: just full-on nudity, muscles glistening, sinews flexing and bits flapping.

The museums are full of Ancient Greek pots and pans that show chaps in frank naked grapple, throw and sprint, as if this were all frightfully splendid but not so frightfully remarkable. This was long before the moral agenda was set in countries with cold climates in which the only possible reason for taking your clothes off was sex. Perhaps the entire sex-is-dirty thesis can be put down to the weather of northern Europe.

But in the Ancient Greek Games, nudity was both celebrated and taken for granted. That naked sport was incidentally erotic was also accepted with some enthusiasm. Men didn’t have sport because it was erotic, but they took on its incidental eroticism without coyness or defiance. They had no relish for the notion of naked women joining in, and the founder of the modern Games, Baron de Coubertin, said that the function of women at the Games was to garland the winners. But these days women — admittedly clothed women — play a full part in the Games, and only add to the erotic aura that has always surrounded the event.

“Of course it’s erotic — look at those tits,” as Rita says in Willie Rushton’s play. But women have always been more at ease than men when talking about the erotic nature of bodies of their own gender.

Carl Lewis won four gold medals on the track in Los Angeles in 1984, and incidentally projected a disturbing, epicene beauty as he did so. Men found it hard to deal with his beauty and so, inevitably, the rumour came out that he was homosexual. Daley Thompson, who won the decathlon gold for Britain, pranced about in victory wearing a T-shirt that asked “Is the world’s second greatest athlete gay?”. In fact Lewis was resolutely heterosexual, but the world (or the heterosexual male world) dealt with his beauty by nicknaming him “the flying faggot”.