Picture this: you’re one of the top athletes in the word, and you’re in PyeongChang for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Everything’s great and you’re pumped to compete…but Valentine’s Day is coming up and you still don’t have a special someone. What do you do? Like anyone else, you download Tinder.
Yep, Olympic athletes use Tinder just like the rest of us. Actually, according to the data from Tinder, they might use it even more.
“Tinder in the Olympic Village is next level,” American snowboarder Jamie Anderson told US Weekly during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. “It’s all athletes! In the mountain village it’s all athletes. It’s hilarious. There are some cuties on there.”
Could you imagine what Tinder’s like in the Olympic village right now? #Olympics2018
— Sam $$$in (@SammyCashin) February 12, 2018
She’s not wrong. According to a press representative, Tinder usage in the Olympic Village has already increased 348 percent since the athletes started arriving, right swipes have increased 565%, and matches have increased 644%.
And you can bet that as the games heat up, so will the looooove.
Tinder has provided users in the Olympic Village with free access to Tinder Gold. If you don’t know what Tinder Gold is, well, listen up, because you’re going to be scrambling to download it before Valentine’s Day.
Basically, if you’ve ever said, “Man, I wish you could do ____ on Tinder”, then Tinder Gold probably lets you do whatever that was. You get unlimited likes and five Super Likes per day. It also has a Rewind feature, which allows you to go back and find someone you might have accidentally swiped left on. There’s also a Likes You feature, which lets you see whether or not someone has liked you before you swipe on them.
Arguably the most exciting feature of Tinder Gold is the Passport feature. Passport allows you to connect with users anywhere in the world by dropping a pin into whatever city you want. So if you see a cute Olympian, you can literally upgrade to Tinder Gold, passport into the Olympic Village and hope he or she swipes right on you. (It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the number of users passporting into the Olympic Villages has increased 1850 percent since the athletes started arriving—who wouldn’t take that opportunity!?)
Watching the Olympics is always fun, but is it just me, or does knowing that these mega-athletes are also swiping on each other on Tinder make it even more fun?