OK, let's talk about sex at the Rio Olympics

Olympians are doin' it, doin' it and doin' it well.
 By 
Sam Laird
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Olympians are doin' it, doin' it and doin' it well, to paraphrase one LL Cool J.

We're talking about sports, of course. But the same applies to sex at the Games.

Ten-thousand of the world's most finely tuned athletes are living in dorm-style housing for the Rio Olympics. They're swiping right like crazy Tinder. They're in a city renowned for its sexual openness. Once they finish their scheduled competitions, culminating years of training, they're trying to blow off some steam.


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Looks like the situation calls for -- hmmm, let's see here -- oh, about a half a million condoms. Seriously, though: Rio organizers stocked the Olympic Village and other venues with 450,000 condoms this year, a record for the Games.

It's time, ladies and gentlemen, to discuss sex at the 2016 Olympics.

We'll get to the condoms, but let's start with the Tinder. Matches in the Olympic Village spiked by 129 percent last weekend, according to company spokeswoman Rosette Pambakian. Tinder expects that trend to continue after the app rose to prominence in the Olympic Village during the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

Marcus Nyman, who's in Brazil to compete for Sweden in judo, told the Associated Press he got 10 Tinder matches after about a day in Rio. Fencer Yemi Apithy, from the West African nation of Benin, said that he's "for sure" gotten matches, too, because "I am a pretty boy."

That's the thing: Rio's Olympic village is full of pretty men and women right now, highly trained athletes with sculpted bodies and the physical stamina to, um, "train" all night. As American javelin thrower Breaux Greer told ESPN in 2012: "Even if their face is a seven, their body is a 20."

And -- no matter your sexual orientation, sex drive or sexual mores -- the Olympics are an extremely rare human experience.

"With a once-in-a-lifetime experience, you want to build memories, whether it's sexual, partying or on the field," Hope Solo told ESPN during the London Olympics. "I've seen people having sex right out in the open. On the grass, between buildings, people are getting down and dirty."

Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Needless to say, you're going need a lot of condoms. That year in London, organizers provided 150,000. Two years later in Sochi, the reported number was 100,000. That's the same total as the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where condom wrappers were branded with the Olympic motto: "Faster. Higher. Stronger."

But never in human history has there been an Olympic condom count anywhere near Rio's total of 450,000. The condoms come from condom-dispensing machines with little levers one turns to get a rubber -- just like buying a gumball. The prophylactic-issuing machines read, "Celebrate with a condom!" (Yes, the exclamation mark is included.)

You can even grab one on your way out of the dining hall, as shown in this photo from Yahoo's Greg Wyshynski.

But there's a catch.

“You have to turn the thing and it is really loud. I just sort of went in and got a couple and then left, to be honest,” Clarke Johnstone, an equestrian athlete from New Zealand, told USA Today.

Conventional Olympic-sex wisdom goes like this: As the 16-day Games wear on, more and more athletes finish competing; then they get to boning.

“When you go to the village in the beginning, it’s relatively quiet. Everybody’s doing their thing. Going to the mess hall, coming back home, saying hello along the way, and then back to training," American fencer Race Imboden told Yahoo's Wyshynski. "But then, as the days start getting into the actual events, there will be people coming back to the village at 12 o’clock yelling and screaming. And you’ll, like, meet people and you’ll just know the village is getting a little louder and a little more rowdy and then it’s just a party."

Make that a very exclusive party, and one stocked with lots of condoms.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Topics Olympics

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Sam Laird

Sam Laird is Mashable's Senior Sports Reporter. He covers the wide, weird world of sports from all angles -- as well as occasional other topics -- from Mashable's San Francisco bureau. Before joining Mashable in November 2011, his freelance work appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slam, and East Bay Express. Sam is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and basketball and burritos take up most of his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @samcmlaird.

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