Go for the Gold (and the hookers)

Prostitutes see gold at Olympics
By Andrew Hanon, QMI Agency

EDMONTON -- Olympic athletes won’t be the only people going for gold in Vancouver next month.

Thousands of prostitutes — including scores from Edmonton — are expected to descend on the West Coast city to cash in on the swelling numbers of fans, media and Olympic employees.

“Cha-ching!” one local escort, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said enthusiastically. “If you know how to work it, it could be huge. You’re damn right.”

But not everyone is as optimistic.

“It’s dead here right now,” says Susan Davis of the West Coast Co-operative of Sex Industry Professionals, which lobbies for the sex trade. “The construction boom is over.

“Those men are a migrant workforce and they’ve moved on.”

She says that the prostitutes who’ve arrived in advance of the Games’ launch on Feb. 12 are taking business away from the ones who live in Vancouver.

“It’s causing a bit of a financial crisis for us,” Davis says. “We’re all relying on the local clientele right now. As more and more (sex) workers come here, our income is being divided even more.”

Davis says that recently she went two days without getting a single call from a client. “Never in my career has that happened before.”

Davis acknowledges that there will be a brief flurry of business while the Olympics are on, but warns any out-of-town escorts to make sure they have a plan in place before heading out there to cash in on it.

“One girl I know came out here from Calgary, thinking she could just find a job at a massage parlour, but no one was hiring. She came without a lot of money in her pocket because she was expecting to be working right away and it just wasn’t there. She got stuck.”

Wow! I'm not usually a fan of the Winter Olympics but with the free vibrators story yesterday and the influx of hookers story today I'm looking forward to the Olympics more than I am the Super Bowl. I mean, hookers don't flood the Super Bowl city like this. Well, unless Eugene Robinson is in town. The bummer part of this story is that the local Vancouver hookers are having to share their turf with all these inserts from Edmonton and Calgary. That hoes need to go back home and celebrate Bret Hart's comeback or something. Olympics are supposed to stimulate the local economy.