How Paris 2024 is bringing sexy back to the Olympics
The Olympics is, by its very nature, horny. Tens of thousands of jacked-up athletes living in the same self-contained complex during one long, hot summer, competing with each other for hunks of gold? Please. Rumours about the “sex-mad” Games have swirled for decades, with athletes telling stories of foursomes, public sex, and a “different woman every night”. That is, until 2021, when sex was, for all intents and purposes, banned.
Taking a leaf out of the Too Hot to Handle playbook (and, you know, following government guidelines), organisers of the pandemic-delayed 2020 Tokyo Games forbade athletes from fucking, in a bid to stop the spread of Covid-19. And, as if this so-called ‘intimacy ban’ wasn’t news enough, it was also the first year that eco-friendly cardboard beds were introduced — dubbed online as anti-sex beds (though this was quickly dispelled, with athletes proving the beds’ durability by jumping up and down on them on TikTok).
But sex is back on the menu this summer, with this year’s Games potentially set to be sexier than ever. Not only are they being held in Paris, the undisputed City of Love, but organisers have, apparently, gone all out with a pleasure-focused sexual health campaign. Oh, and they’re giving out 300,000 free condoms.
While the campaign is a welcome new addition, the condoms are actually an Olympic tradition. The sporting behemoth has a long history of promoting safe sex, with its condom count making headlines since it was first declared ahead of the 1988 Seoul Games, when 8,500 were doled out. Since then, as per Slate’s very helpful graph, that number has risen from 30k to 100k to a whopping 450k at the 2016 Rio Games (the latter is equivalent to 42 per athlete — LOL — which, as the Games run for 17 days, would be two and a half condoms per day).
The Olympics is so dedicated to safe sex that it even gave out 150,000 condoms at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games and an undisclosed amount at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, despite the aforementioned intimacy ban. Although this decision faced some bizarre criticism at the time, it was actually a very commendable move — the Olympics was acknowledging that, although sex was discouraged, if athletes were going to break the rules, it’s better for them to do so safely.
In the last decade, there’s also been an increased focus on women’s sexual health — well, as a gesture, at least. Ever since the 2016 Rio Games, the Olympics has been giving out female condoms alongside the traditional (men’s) condoms. This year, there’s 20,000 of them on offer, as well as 10,000 dental dams. I describe this as a gesture because neither female condoms nor dental dams are particularly well used. As per surveys shared by The Guardian, only 1.7% of US women aged 15 to 44 say they’ve used a female condom, while 2.1% of surveyed Australian women who have sex with women report using dental dams (which are marketed to queer women).
There will be a number of sexual health testing centres in the Olympic Village, too, as well as a campaign to raise awareness of the main STIsI and their modes of transmission. But Paris 2024 isn’t just about safe sex. The campaign will, as a Paris 2024 spokesperson put it in an email to Cosmopolitan UK, centre on “awareness-raising messages focusing on consent and pleasure (vs. performance)”. There’s very little information beyond that line — and strangely no imagery nor specifics to share with the press — though the spokesperson says that the messaging will feature on pop-up banners and flyers around the Village.
So, why is the Olympics so horny? While we’ve certainly no problem with it, aren’t the athletes likely too busy, you know, competing to... collaborate in such a way? “We’re surrounded by the most athletically gifted and talented humans in the world, most of whom are good looking, too. Not to mention the sexy accents,” says Libbie Janse van Rensburg, a South African rugby player — and one of many athletes who shared a video of themselves testing the hardiness of their cardboard beds this week after arriving in the Olympic Village. “It’s just human nature, really.” (Rensburg has a boyfriend back home, so the testing was for social media purposes only.)
What’s more, she adds: “It [hooking up with someone] is also just a way for athletes to let loose after the Games. It takes so much dedication, hard work, and commitment to perform at this level, and we often offer up a lot of our, let’s call it, ‘normal life’ activities when we’re in peak performance. Just as you might relax after a big game with a couple of friends and drinks, I think some athletes relax and de-stress in other ways.”
Although this is Rensburg’s first Olympic Games, she’s heard the rumours, just like everyone else. “I’ve heard stories of athletes who were in the Village for 20 days and slept with 25 people,” she says. “Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know. I believe that most athletes understand that they have a job to do first, which is the reason they’re at the Olympics, but once the job’s done, it’s okay to enjoy the experience a little bit.”
Rensburg says she hasn’t seen much of the Olympics’ pleasure-focused sexual health messaging outside of the site’s polyclinic, where she saw flyers and condoms. The outside world has had a glimpse at the latter, though, thanks to Canadian sailor Sarah Douglas, who shared a video of the “Olympic-branded condoms”, which come in pink or blue packages emblazoned with the taglines, ‘Fair play, safe play: consent first’, ‘On the field of love, play fair. Ask for consent’, and, ‘No need to be a gold medalist to wear it!’. On the back of the packet is a message that reads: “According to WHO, last year, around 630,000 people died from HIV-related causes and 1.3 million people acquired HIV. Protect yourself, test yourself!”
Without actually seeing the campaign, it’s hard to properly comment on it — but it’s undeniably significant for a major institution like the Olympics to allegedly be centering pleasure and consent in its sexual health messaging, especially at a time when sex education is under threat around the world, including in the UK.
“I’ve not seen the campaign, but in theory it’s very positive,” says Sam Hepworth, head of communications at sexual health charity Brook. “It’s really encouraging to see an organisation the size and reach of the Olympics having conversations about sexual health that also involves consent and pleasure. There’s a real opportunity to help normalise these conversations and to make people feel more comfortable [to have them].”
“Young people don’t respond positively to relentless warnings about risk and harm that don’t necessarily reflect the context or the complexity of the relationships they’re seeing around them,” Hepworth continues. “Taking a realistic approach [to sex education] that engages with the subject of pleasure is actually really effective for addressing and removing shame and stigma, which is what makes people feel uncomfortable about communicating about sex, and can cause problems with their attitudes towards it.”
It’s also an important part of keeping young people safe. “If they understand that sex should be something that they enjoy, then they can make clearer decisions about what they do and don’t feel comfortable doing,” adds Hepworth. “It enables them to understand what their boundaries are and empowers them to confidently communicate them. It also helps them understand when those boundaries have been overstepped.”
What’s more, he says, the discussion of pleasure can be really valuable in challenging gender stereotypes. “We’re still in a world where a lot of messages about sexual pleasure focus on the idea that men are entitled to sexual pleasure more than women, or that they should take the lead in sexual relationships. [Pleasure-based sex education that centres on gender equity can] help take the pressure off individuals to enact certain gender roles within relationships.”
It’s worth noting that, while this campaign is undoubtedly a positive thing, the Olympics is far from a role model when it comes to smashing gender stereotypes. Female Olympic hopefuls and athletes have famously been subjected to, as the The New York Times once called it, the “humiliating practice” of sex-testing — enacted over the years via strip searches, chromosome testing, and hormone testing. So we shouldn’t give the Olympics too much uncritical praise.
Nonetheless, Hepworth is hopeful that the institution’s sexual health campaign will encourage governments to take heed. “You’d hope that seeing a big organisation like the Olympics — which isn’t a particularly controversial organisation; it often wants to steer clear of things that are seen as political — highlighting the subject will take the political sting out of the idea of pleasure-based sex education, and will help people see that this is a valuable part of sex and relationships education.”
In the meantime, Olympians can at least take advantage of the campaign and its offerings — though they might not be taking full advantage just yet. “There’s no wild parties yet, but closer to the end, people will start to celebrate their victories,” concludes Rensburg. But, she admits, it might be cardboard bed dependent. “I reckon the beds will hold our under some athletes, but maybe not all of them.”
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