Research says yes to sex - and don't the athletes just love it

'No sex please they're athletes' used to be the conventional wisdom when discussing the merits or otherwise of some pre-match hanky-panky.

Although sportsmen and women the world over are not known to be great abstainers, their coaches and doctors regularly warn of the debilitating effects of 'fore play'.

At World Cups and the like, managers lock up their players to prevent any nocturnal naughtiness in the age-old belief that a good performance in bed translates into a poor performance on the field.

Well, researchers in Italy - it had to be Italy, didn't it - have discovered the opposite. Sex before a game, it seems, can be a pick me up, not a deflator.

It's all to do with testosterone, the hormone that dictates sex drive and aggression. The notion that celibate sportsmen do it better because testosterone levels build up when a player is deprived of sex is bogus. In fact, the more you do it, the more you want it.

'It's like starvation. When you don't eat you aren't hungry but when you start to eat regularly, then hunger returns,' said one of the researchers, a good doctor Emmanuele Jannini.

Of course, he has not uncovered anything that the randier beings in the sports world did not know already. All those NBA players who Sports Illustrated revealed had fathered hundreds of children out of wedlock must have been hard at it the night before an important game and they still put points on the board.