Every four years, the greatest athletes in the world come together to compete at the highest possible level their sport has to offer: the Olympics. Representing 206 countries, thousands of athletes from soccer players to javelin throwers to skateboarders pour into the Games’ host city ready to compete for the gold, follow their dreams, and, apparently, have sex.
It’s not exactly a secret that athletes in the Olympic Village are horny — in fact, they’ve admitted it themselves. Soccer player Hope Solo told ESPN in 2012 that “there’s a lot of sex going on” at the Olympics. Josh Lakatos, a US trap shooter, even revealed that he’s “never witnessed so much debauchery in [his] entire life,” while swimmer Ryan Lochte added that he’d guess around 70 to 75 percent of Olympians partake in between-the-sheets activities. “Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do,” he said.
While the Olympic Games are thousands of years old, the infamous Olympic Village has only been around for 100 years — but the lore of what goes on inside the private, athletes-only residence halls runs deep. It’s been said in GQ that someone once “woke up in the village one morning with nothing but a baguette on,” and even Grindr allegedly crashed during the 2012 Games in London, according to The Daily Mirror.
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Kelly Campbell, PhD, is a psychology professor at California State University, San Bernardino who has studied the link between love and athletic performance.
And we get it: these athletes are young, hot, amped up on pre-competition energy and obviously at their athletic peak, meaning that getting down and dirty in the Village is pretty much unavoidable. Psychology professor Kelly Campbell, PhD, thinks so. She spent the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver interviewing Olympians inside the Village and studying the effects that love and romance have on athletic performance. Based on her interactions, Dr. Campbell says that the athletes (at least, some of them) are definitely having sex.
“You can attribute it to a lot of things. If you think about who’s there, it’s people who are relatively matched in age, they’re all extremely physically fit, they have these characteristics that are already going to create this heightened environment,” she tells PS.
She also interviewed people who worked in the Olympic Village, including cafeteria and food delivery workers to get the inside scoop. “As the Games progress and people are there longer, [the workers said] you start to see these little partnerships happening,” she says.
Before attending the 2020 Tokyo Games (which were held in 2021 due to the pandemic), Ali Gibson, a basketball player representing Puerto Rico, tells PS that finding out what goes on in the Village was one of the things she was most looking forward to — besides competing, of course. “The Village is everything,” she says. “Everyone’s talking about how all of the athletes are going to interact and be around each other, so that was definitely something I was looking forward to.”
After attending the Games, Gibson says that most athletes are super focused on competing — that is, until their event ends. “They let loose after that,” she says.
Like, really let loose, according to Viktoria*, a Tokyo 2020 Olympic athlete who requested anonymity. “By the time my competition was over, I had only one thing on my mind — to hook up and release this pent up energy,” she tells PS. “It’s crazy in the Village. Athletes download Tinder just for those two weeks and set their location to the few [miles] radius of the Olympic Village, and both men and women are always on the lookout for a good catch.”
“There’s another mini Olympics happening — the hookup Olympics.”
“Amongst your closest friends in your team, there’s another mini Olympics happening — the hookup Olympics,” she adds. In that iteration of the games, some events consisted of who can kiss the most people in one night, who can get a gold medalist into bed, and who can find out which sports team had the best performance off the field — and in the bedroom. “It’s the most fun ever,” she says.
“Because the Olympics comes around only once every four years, you almost feel like this is your one moment to go all in and experience the craziness,” Viktoria adds. “We would have parties every night once we were done with the competition and I would always end up with someone new. It’s definitely one of the craziest experiences of my life.”
Both Viktoria and Gibson’s first Olympics was Tokyo 2020, which came with a new rule: no leaving the Village. “Usually what happens is athletes throw parties,” Gibson says. “[They] rent out penthouses or whatever and throw parties around town at restaurants at night, but you couldn’t leave the Village because of COVID unless you were going to a game or practice, so all of the parties had to be handled in the Village.”
And no, those “anti-sex beds” (which were debunked) didn’t stop the athletes from fornicating, either. Viktoria says being forced to stay in one place made the athlete’s quarters feel like the “Love Island” villa. “There was definitely still intimacy happening throughout that Village, for sure,” Gibson says.
On what surprised her most during her time in the Village, Viktoria recalls, “Some athletes who are married or in committed long term relationships decide that the rules don’t apply in the Village.” She adds, “Not all of them, but some. My friends and I always made sure we did a few background social media checks on the athletes to make sure we weren’t hooking up with married athletes.”
“People go wild. Australia always has the best parties after, and so does Great Britain,” says Hannah*, a five-time paralympic swimmer who requested anonymity. “It’s wild. You don’t think that everyone is hooking up, but everyone is literally hooking up. And you come to find out after the Games that some people were hooking up with multiple people.”
While Hannah says she didn’t partake in the frenzy of Olympic hookups, she did get to bring in her boyfriend (now husband) to do the deed. “It was fun to bring [him] into the Village just to say I did that in the Village,” she says.
While there are athletes who certainly have sex at the Olympics, the happenings in the Village aren’t as salacious and scandalous as the media makes them seem. There are definitely opportunities to let your freak flag fly, like Viktoria says, but that’s not the reality for what appears to be the majority of athletes. “It’s not that crazy,” Kyra Condie, a US climber, tells PS. “My expectations were that it was going to be totally insane, and I think, depending on how involved you are in it, it’s not that crazy. I’m not walking around a corner and seeing people hook up.”
The intrigue we have about the Olympic Village may have erupted into the obsession that it is today back when the condom program was first introduced in 1988. Although the aim was to bring awareness to HIV and AIDS, instead, the public became more interested in whether or not those thousands (and thousands!) of condoms were actually being used. And while there isn’t a way to figure out exactly how many condoms end up in the trash, the 2000 Sydney Games had to have 20,000 extra condoms shuttled in after the first 50,000 wasn’t enough. Now, 300,000 rubbers — along with packets of lube — are being sent to the Paris 2024 Games.
Sex, in general, is a topic that’s both taboo and a significant part of our everyday culture. “Americans have a very strange relationship with sex,” Dr. Campbell says. “We shouldn’t talk too much about it in school, but yet we can use it to sell hamburgers and plaster it all over billboards. It’s partly that dichotomy that makes it interesting because if it weren’t secretive, it wouldn’t be as interesting.”
But it’s also the fact that we, the public, don’t know what goes on in the Olympic Village that makes its intrigue all the more intense. “We see in the public what’s going on with their sport, but we don’t see anything else,” Dr. Campbell says. “Everyone’s wondering, what about the rest? We don’t have that lens, it’s private, so people are going to have an interest in it.”
“What I’d like the public to understand is that when you’re in an elite, high performance sport, there’s many days, weeks, and months of the year when we’re separated from normal life and everyday society,” Viktoria says. “When you’re in the competitive season, you don’t get to meet anyone new or have a normal social life. For us, being in the Olympic Village is like having all of those missed out opportunities concentrated into two weeks. It’s not like we’re doing anything out of the ordinary!”
Speaking to PS prior to heading to Paris, Viktoria says she’s excited for what’s to come. “Who knows,” she says. “I might meet someone when I’m there.”
*Names have been changed.
Elizabeth Gulino is a freelance journalist who specializes in topics relating to wellness, sex, relationships, work, money, lifestyle, and more. She spent four and a half years at Refinery29 as a senior writer and has worked for House Beautiful, Complex, and The Hollywood Reporter.