Yes, Olympic Athletes Also Use Dating Apps at the 2024 Paris Summer Games

The “city of love” may also inspire Olympic athletes to turn to dating apps during the Paris Summer Games. 

In the days leading up the opening ceremony on Friday, July 26, some users on TikTok suggested that users on various dating apps change their locations to Paris for a chance to potentially match with an Olympic athlete during the Games.

A spokesperson at Bumble tells PEOPLE that "in the lead up to the games, we've seen an increase in people changing their Bumble profile location to Paris and adding mentions of the Paris Games in their bios."

A Tinder spokesperson tells PEOPLE since the beginning of July 2024, there has been almost a 20% increase in swiping activity in France and a 103% increase in activity on Tinder's Passport Mode — a capability on the app that allows users to "search by city or drop a pin on the map to begin liking, matching and chatting with others in their destination of choice."

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Brown also says that "there has been an increase in the number of users with the job descriptions ‘Olympian’ (+52%) and ‘athlete’ (+43%) in users' Tinder profile in Paris."

With more people on the apps, Grindr announced updates to temporarily “disable location-based features” within the Olympic Village aimed at protecting their users.

In a blog post shared on July 24, Grindr explained that the protocol was first set in place at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and the goal with removing these capabilities will allow “LGBTQ+ athletes [to] connect with each other authentically without worrying about prying eyes or unwanted attention.”

“If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them on the app,” the app wrote. 

Along with disabling location-based features, Grindr will also allow free and premium users to “send unlimited disappearing messages and unsend messages after they're sent, disable screenshots for profile images and media in-chat” and disable private videos within the Olympic Village. 

Sex and relationships at the Olympics Games especially became a hot topic after officials at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics enacted a "sex ban" partly due to COVID-19 restrictions that delayed the Games to 2021. 

Rumors that the viral cardboard beds were made to discourage sex at the Olympic Village especially went rampant during the Tokyo Games, but officials debunked them on X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2021 and again on TikTok on July 8.  

Team USA's Olympic Village Director Daniel Smith previously confirmed to PEOPLE that the sex ban has been lifted for the Paris Games and that 300,000 condoms have been distributed across the Olympic Village.

The condoms have been made available at Team USA’s "athlete resource center," an “athletes only” space where “they can take [them] as they need," Smith said.

Team USA has rules and regulations set in place around who is allowed access to the athlete’s space and Smith said that ​​athletes from other countries "can come into [the athlete’s] common area," but “try to keep athletes from other countries out of our residential space.”

"It's not so much for the sex,” Smith clarified. “It's more for security reasons." 

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