With 10,500 athletes set to converge on Paris for the 2024 Olympics, it looks as if gay athletes looking to hook up will not be able to access Grindr within the Olympic village. And there’s a good reason for that.
“They blocked Grindr in the Olympic Village,” Louis Pisano, an American living in Paris, wrote on X, in a post that has been viewed 2 million times.
The Daily Mail got a statement from Olympic organizers that seemed to confirm this, without naming Grindr. “The Paris 2024 organizing committee told Mail Online dating apps are accessible within the Olympic Village, ‘but for some, geolocation has been deactivated by the app publisher.'”
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“Grindr imposed the same restriction during the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022,” the website wrote, “with the app’s equality head Jack Harrison-Quintan saying at the time: ‘We want Grindr to be a space where all queer athletes, regardless of where they’re from, feel confident connecting with one another while they’re in the Olympic Village.'”
This decision stems from a case of journalistic malpractice by the Daily Beast in 2016. To refresh your memory, here are the details as we reported at the time:
On Aug. 11, 2016, reporter Nico Hines and the Daily Beast decided to write what they thought was a fun, click-bait story from the Olympic village in Rio.
“I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour at the Olympic Village” read the headline on the article, which was the site’s most-read story that day. Hines regaled his readers with a tale of a straight guy posing as gay on Grindr and came to this conclusion: Young, athletic men like having sex. Stop the presses!
The article had one major problem: It gave enough identifying information to out some gay athletes, including people who live in countries where being gay is a crime.
The Daily Beast revised the initial story to remove some of the worst parts but took the entire day to unpublish it, and only after an international outcry on social media. Even the International Olympic Committee, not normally a bastion of progressive thought, condemned the article.
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Grindr is wisely taking no chances that this could happen again. Whether other gay hookup apps are affected in the village is unknown. “But did they block sniffies jackd tindr blowers n double meet?” someone asked on X. Obviously, gay athletes can still meet up outside the village, but nowhere will there be as big a concentration of Olympians.
Dating, flirting and hooking up are clearly on athletes’ minds, as the number of condoms available attest. Put young, super-fit athletes together in the same space and fireworks are sure to occur, regardless of orientation. Just ask Tyler Downs, an American diver:
“I mean, it’s not completely off my mind,” Downs, 20, told US Weekly while promoting his partnership with Rizz, the world’s first flirting app. “Whatever happens, happens. I guess we’ll have to see.”
He adds, “It’s Paris. It’s the city of love and all that stuff. I’m hoping that people can find connections.”
