Free condoms for athletes have been a mainstay of the Olympics since the ‘80s, but Italy is proving to be stingy with the contraceptives.
Olympians at the Milano Cortina Winter Games burned through all of the condoms provided by the Olympic organizers in a record-breaking three days.
“The supplies ran out in just three days,” an anonymous athlete told Italian newspaper La Stampa, as reported by The Guardian. “They promised us more will arrive, but who knows when.”
The condoms may have run out quickly, but La Stampa places the blame on Olympic organizers who didn’t stock enough condoms. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, officials provided athletes with 200,000 male condoms (that were branded with the Summer Games' mascot), 20,000 female condoms, and 10,000 oral dams, but the outlet accused organizers of only stocking the Olympic Village with 10,000 condoms at this year’s Winter Games.
“In Paris, the athletes received 300,000 condoms – two per day each – but the numbers for these Winter Games were significantly lower: not even 10,000,” La Stampa’s report said.
But the large number of condoms at the Paris Olympics was already a reduction from past years — at the 2016 Rio Olympics, athletes were supplied with 450,000 condoms.
Gay figure skater Adam Rippon recently admitted on the NBC podcast My New Favorite Olympian that he’s to blame for the shortage at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018. “If you were wondering where 3,000 of the condoms went from the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, I took them," Rippon said.
Despite the hundreds of thousands of condoms usually available at the Olympic Village, reportedly there aren’t enough this time around, despite the International Olympic Committee’s commitment to safe sex that started at the 1988 Seoul Olympics in an effort to raise awareness during the AIDs crisis.
“Yes, we provide free condoms to athletes in the Olympic village,” Lombardy region governor Attilio Fontana said in a social media post. “If this seems strange to some, they’re unaware of the established Olympic practice. It began at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 to raise awareness among athletes and young people about sexually transmitted disease prevention— a topic that shouldn’t cause embarrassment.”
