Featured Image Credit: Tiktok/@tomdaley/Instagram/rhysmcc1
Topics: Olympics, Sex and Relationships, Sport, TikTok, World News, Europe
Yasmeen Hamadeh
Topics: Olympics, Sex and Relationships, Sport, TikTok, World News, Europe
Round up a bunch of Olympians in the same hotel and what do you get? A lot of sex.
Since the 1988 Seoul Olympics that first saw the games’ condom count making it into the news, the Olympics has regularly distributed a pool, more like an ocean, of condoms to its athletes and has well-embraced the fact that they will be getting intimate, so they might as well be doing it safely.
From an estimate of 450,000 condoms being distributed during the 2016 Rio Olympics, to an expected 300,000 at this year’s Paris Olympics, the condom count has become somewhat of an Olympic tradition. But despite the berzerk outpour of condoms, there still remains a questionable obstacle to Olympians having sex — their beds.
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Introduced in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the Olympic village (a residential complex that hosts all athletes during the games) has swapped out the average bed for the cardboard bed, a nifty invention whereby everything except the mattress is made out of cardboard.
The cardboard beds were widely believed to be made to discourage the athletes from having sex, as they’re not sturdy enough to withhold the act (so to say).
The Olympics committee has denied that that’s why the new beds were made and claim it's for the purpose of sustainability.
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Georgina Grenon, director of environmental excellence for the organising committee, said: "I hope that Paris 2024’s efforts to reduce its impact will show that it is possible to do things differently."
Still, the 'anti-sex' beds - as they're known - are a running joke that has made a comeback in this year’s Paris Olympics.
Now the question on everyone’s minds, can Olympians still have sex on these beds? Well, apparently they can and we’ve got British diver Tom Daley to thank for the research.
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Taking to his TikTok page on July 22, Daley posted a short clip of him trying to exert as much as pressure as possible on the beds to see if they’d crack.
He jumped around. He recreated some positions. He hopped around some more just for safe measure. And lo and behold, the bed was completely fine!
“As you can see, they’re pretty sturdy,” Daley remarks in the video as his bed perfectly maintained its poise.
Now, what is any research inquiry without some peer review, so in case Daley’s findings weren’t enough, Irish gymnast Rhys McClenaghan also did some experimenting of his own.
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Posting to his Instagram, McClenaghan took things further and actually did gymnastic moves on his bed — jumping, flipping around, the works — and the verdict? The bed survived, yet again!
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“They passed the test,” he says in the video. “It’s fake news!”
So, despite the thought of the Olympics having anti-sex beds while still distributing 300,000 condoms being hilarious, apparently the athletes can still have sex on these beds and the rumors are all false.
Do with that information as you will!