Leave it to PETA to take a perfectly calm, serene occasion like the Beijing Olympics and turn it into a media circus.

Well … on second thought, maybe even PETA won’t get much attention this week. They’re pushing swimming gold-medalist Amanda Beard out in front of the media as part of the I’d-rather-go-naked-than-wear-fur campaign. You know, because Amanda stripped it all off for Playboy last year (NSFW link).

Very clever, you PETA rascals. She’s getting naked. Again. Yawn.

Here’s what Beard says in the PETA press release:

“Seeing animals slaughtered to be worn as fashion is awful to me, so I’m definitely against wearing fur … I’d much rather go naked than ever put a dead animal on my body.“

No dead animals in her wardrobe? Against slaughter for fashion? I’m not buying it. Neither should you.

Here’s what Amanda told shoe blogger Meghan Cleary last year when asked, “What pair of shoes would you want to be buried in?”:

“Something that just screams ‘me.’ All of my friends would agree that it would be this pair of leather sandals that I wear all the time. I wear them on the pool deck, at the beach, and even sneak them into my wardrobe for dinners.”

Want more? Oh, yeah — I got a lotta more. Here’s Amanda in Smart Money magazine last September:

[D]on’t let Beard’s conservative portfolio fool you. She still has her indulgences. The daredevil athlete is into extreme sports such as bungee jumping, scuba diving, snowboarding, motorcycles and dirt bike racing. In her mind, she mitigates the risk of a bad spill by buying the best equipment. “You don’t take 50% off the leather jacket you use to ride on your motorcycle,” she says. “When you’re skidding across the highway you want something that fits.”

And at right, courtesy of the good people at UGGS, is a photo of Amanda trying on some genuine UGGS Australian sheepskin boots (and looking pretty happy about it).

Honestly, you’d think PETA would be better at vetting their olympians. It took our merry band of pranksters about ten minutes to find out that Amanda Beard isn’t really a radical animal-rights wingnut. (Thank God for that!) She wears animal products just like a regular person.

Color me shocked.

Hey — I bet Amanda hangs her gold medals from a mink stole when nobody’s looking.

UPDATE: Amanda explains herself, sort of …

And a special Deceiver welcome to Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times blog readers. Apparently Amanda Beard has some ’splaining to do to her hometown readers …

And howdy to Dan Steinberg’s readers at the Washington Post too. Nice of Amanda Beard to confirm that she didn’t bring any leather goods with her to China. But unless she’s embracing the whole PETA enchilada — and that means opposing lab-rat-aided AIDS and cancer research, too, by the way — she’d better be prepared for targeting by bigger guns than this humble blog.