Contributed by: kellyseal on Wednesday, August 21 2024 @ 12:43 pm
Last modified on Wednesday, August 21 2024 @ 12:50 pm
Tinder, Bumble and Hinge have seen surges in downloads and user activity around the Athlete’s Village in Paris as the 2024 Summer Olympics get underway.
According to The Daily Mail, these dating apps have reported thousands of new downloads. Athletes have gravitated to dating apps in the past to hook up during the Olympics, with the exception of an intimacy ban in 2020 due to Covid concerns.
Paris officials have a different agenda from athletes, providing single beds made of cardboard so that they would be discouraged from having so much sex during the competitions. This has created a lot of buzz on TikTok, with athletes testing out the sturdiness of the beds by jumping on them. (They don’t break or fall apart.)
Officials have also denied air conditioning in the rooms of athletes, providing fans instead despite the scorching summer temperatures expected the next few weeks. (U.S. officials however have provided their athletes with portable air conditioners for comfort.)
Olympics officials have also provided over 200,000 condoms in places around the Village according to Daily Mail[*1] , so athletes are protected, even if they are discouraged from hooking up. For most competitors, it’s hard to resist having sex with some of the most fit singles in the world.
As one athlete put it on a recent podcast: “There’s basically people who just party in the village and everyone just starts to obviously intermingle. There are thousands of athletes that have been training in discipline for four years, some of the best-looking people on the planet all in one place.”
Dating app Grindr has taken a different tactic than Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. Grindr profiles for those staying in Olympic Village have been disabled for searches, so if anyone tries to match with an athlete, no profiles appear. Grindr said this was to protect athletes that come from more conservative countries, so that they wouldn’t be exposed, and to protect those who weren’t public with their sexuality. This move follows a big controversy that happened in the 2016 games in Brazil, where a reporter from The Daily Beast outed several closeted athletes for an article. The article was pulled and the media outlet apologized, but the damage had been done.
Tinder just launched a new AI-driven feature that chooses the best photos for a user from their camera roll. Likely the app was hoping to see renewed interest after several slow quarters of declining downloads as younger singles are turning to other ways of meeting people besides through dating apps.
Hinge seems to be the front runner so far among Olympians, with more athletes turning to this platform to find matches than other dating apps, at least as the games have begun.