News that a taekwondo athlete in New Zealand is attempting to fund his bid for 2012 Olympic glory by opening a brothel in Auckland has been greeted glumly by local sports chiefs, seen his business partner get thrown out of his parents' home and resulted in his deselection from this year's world championships. But anyone who thinks that linking the Olympics with sex might in some way harm its image is being naïve – the two are already active bedfellows, entangled as firmly as any copulating couple.

Before we get on to the behaviour of athletes who do make it to the event, Logan Campbell is not the first – not even the first New Zealander – to use sex as a means of reaching it. Ten years ago, in the same city, the cyclist Nicole Tasker was lap-dancing her way to Sydney. In 1992, Kiwi swimmer Toni Jeffs' journey to Barcelona was sponsored by the owner of a strip club. It is a bit late for the nation's sporting authorities to start playing the prude.

Campbell, who should probably be more embarrassed about the fact that his sporting career was entirely inspired by the hit movie The Karate Kid, estimates that he needs to raise £120,000 in two years if he is to successfully compete in London and can't think of any better ways of doing it. "Some people on the team will not think highly of me for doing this," he says. "If they saw this place and how it's operated, they'd change their mind."

At anything up to NZ$2500 (£970) a night, Campbell and his partner are not precisely patrolling the seedy end of the vice business. They employ only "smart, attractive" girls, and "don't treat them like pieces of meat".

Having finished 16th in Beijing, after losing in the first round to the eventual bronze medallist, Campbell has experienced life in the Olympic village. It appears that the main differences between it and his brothel is that the latter has only 14 rooms and their use is not free. In Sydney, athletes famously used the 70,000 free condoms organisers had distributed so quickly that another 20,000 had to be ordered – and they had all gone three days before the party ended. There were 10,651 athletes there. On one occasion three prostitutes were found in the village itself, guests of a "major American television network".

In Athens 10,568 athletes got through 130,000 condoms. At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City local Mormons took to the streets when news broke of the 250,000 condoms that were being trucked into town. As that event progressed, vending machines were being restocked every two hours. This is what happens when thousands of young, single, beautiful people spend lots of time together with nothing much to do and lots of free parties to attend.

Marco Buechel, a skier who competed for Liechtenstein in Salt Lake City, described one relationship he enjoyed there. "You can contact any athlete, even if you don't know them at all," he reported. "They give you a list when you get there. Everybody uses it. I saw this beautiful ski racer, from Greece of all places. She had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. I sent her an email, in English. Her reply was very short: 'Not good English. Want meet you.' We tried to talk, which wasn't very successful, and then we started to drink, which was much more successful."

The result? "It was very beautiful," he said. "A beautiful international incident."

This isn't the place for a debate about the morality of prostitution. Some might commend Campbell's entrepreneurial vim, some might find the whole business repugnant, but if anyone at the IOC thinks this kind of thing reflects badly on their event, they will probably find their sheets weren't so clean in the first place.