Lolo Jones Might Be a Virgin Forever

Why would anyone want to date a professional athlete? Sure, they’re young, in peak physical shape, have their afternoons free, and the best of them make scads of money. But unless you have a fetish for sweat and potential steroid use, they’re terrible company. Because they spent their adolescence training in performance institutes instead of checking out death metal bands or reading decent books, they have no personality.

Like principals and fathers, athletes are boring and un-engaging. They get up early. They don’t eat junk food, and if they do, they’re going to become super fat the second they stop competing. Like Walter Iooss Jr. said, they only care about money, sex, and competition. That’s no fun. You can’t go to the planetarium and smoke dust with someone who has OCD; you can’t wrap your arms around a sinewy high jumper who wakes up at 3 AM to pound protein shakes.

Still, they’re not so different from the folks in the stands. They put their pants on over one incredibly muscled leg at a time just like everyone else. Like LL Cool J and my building’s super’s daughter, they need love. Lolo Jones, Olympic hurdler, Nike she-pitchman, nude model, LSU graduate, and decent Twitter-haver also needs love, though unlike most athletes, she’s a virgin—cue the kinda-pervy articles. She also dates online, which most super-athletes and, I’m guessing, virgins, don’t do, and so it is with mild surprise that she told People it hasn’t been going well. Jones comes across as cool on Twitter, but who wants to hang out with someone who has to fly to Denver to take lung capacity exams every weekend? She should be sticking to fellow athletes as romantic partners, poor dating pool quality be damned. Below is a handful of husbands/flower-snatchers. With a few exceptions, are all terrible options.

Tim Tebow

Tim Tebow, the virgin blockhead shit-armed quarterback cube for the Jets, is probably the initial choice here if you’re barely paying attention and focused on “virgin” in the headline. It works, in some way, since both are holding out for marriage, and both are funny. But while Jones is linearly funny, Tebow is, as David Roth pointed out, unintentionally hilarious (viz., he was courted, and signed by, the Jets; he can’t actually play football; he’s an orator; he will make more money this year than all my uncles’ careers put together.)

Odds: 0-5

A.C. Green

Famously a longtime virgin and less famously the NBA’s Iron Man—he missed only three games in like 17 seasons—it could happen between Green and Jones. Of course, she’d have to have some sort of time machine to go back to when he actually was a virgin, since he’s married now. People with working time machines are under strict obligations to both kill Hitler and buy vintage skateboards wholesale for a down-payment on a house (my idea, don’t steal it), so it’s not happening. Still, these weird A.C. Green facts are worth mentioning: His first name doesn’t stand for anything, he was married on 4/20, he maintains both a youth abstinence foundation and a concierge service, and he reportedly slept only two hours a night through his career.

Odds: 50-50

Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson’s public face is actually a business meeting gone horribly wrong, or some sort of shit Los Angeles practical joke, but, to his credit, the beared Giants reliever and Jones have a legitimate friendship. Most of this is based, I’m sure, on their shared enrollment at LSU, where he pitched and she was one of the G.O.A.T. hurdlers ever. Wilson, it should be mentioned, was a Christian straight edge kid, and so the jury is out on whether he was cooler then or now. He was also a shorts guy, though—wore ‘em all through high school, in New Hampshire winters—and that kind of affiliation overrides all. (Shorts guys, like farmers, are fundamentally good people, and I’d be fine with one dating my sister.)

Odds: 40-13

Carles Puyol

How ironic that the worst person on the planet and the man with the greatest hair (and life) both have the first name of Carles. Puyol, an elite defender for the inarguably bourgeois yet indelibly outstanding Barcelona FC, has an advantage over most athletes potentially courting Jones in that he has some semblance of a personality. And by that, I mean, he listens to Cannibal Corpse. Most people who listen to Cannibal Corpse are actually incredibly poor, so he also has an advantage over most people. Will they get along? Probably, since Barcelona is close to the London Olympics.

Odds: 1-5

Shaq

Shaquille O’Neal is the worst. No one should date him, except for his onetime girlfriend who looks like this. Him and Jones both went to LSU, though, and relationships have been built on less.

Odds: 1000-1

Michael Schumacher
Michael Schumacher, the greatest F1 driver of all time, is the right answer here. Here’s what we know about him off the rack: His controversial dog is named Ed, and he drives a Fiat. (Schumacher, not Ed.) He’s the first-ever billionaire athlete and lives in Switzerland. What more do you need? Jesus, his dog’s named Ed and he lives in Switzerland. Even if he was a vegetarian they would get along.

Odds: 1-50

Look, getting excited over strangers dating each other might be worse than reading TV recaps. But athletes are celebrities (even if they’re hypnotically dull)—a daily sports media diet leads to an accumulation of factoids, and these strangers become fleshed out into something lower than a friend but more familiar than an acquaintance. Jones is on that track—we'll be hearing a shit-ton about her leading up to and through the Olympics—and so it seems natural to suggest some nice young men who we also don't know but feel like we do. Hopefully they'll be good to her and not start messing around with German shot putters behind her back like her last boyfriend. (No one should have to go through that.) While odds are highest Jones chooses the field over Schumacher and co., it still seems sad that OK Cupid can bum out an Olympian.

@samreiss_