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Under the blue and pink lights of the spotlights, the crowd dances to the rhythm of Rihanna’s hit “We Found Love” in the fan zone in front of Paris City Hall on Tuesday evening, transformed into an open-air nightclub.
Attracting Parisians and visitors from all over the world to the capital known for its romanticism, the Olympic Games are all about meeting people. And it starts on apps.
“As the Games approach, we’ve seen an increase in people changing their Bumble profile location to Paris“, underlines a spokesperson for this dating application.
Tinder, one of its competitors, also notes a “increase of almost 25% in the activity of +swipe+ (swiping of the screen to “like” a profile, Editor’s note) in France“.
The Happn application, which allows people who meet “in real life” to connect, has noted an 87% increase in “likes” in the cities hosting the Games.
It is also at the Stade de France followed by the Stade de la Tour Eiffel that the most “crushes” are recorded (when two users “like” each other), according to the French application.
Coveted athletes
On the apps, participation in the global event becomes a real argument. And the athletes are popular.
Bumble thus reports a “133% increase in the number of people mentioning the term +Olympic Games+ in their biography in France” in July, when Tinder saw an increase in the number of users indicating that they were “Olympian” (+42%) or “athlete” (+43%).
Aurore, 25, who does not want to give her surname, got caught up in the game. The student installed Tinder to find profiles of athletes “for the fun of it, not at all for the match,” she says.
The profiles sought, “There are plenty of them, including French athletes“, confirms the Parisian, but she remains doubtful: “part of me honestly thinks these are fake profiles“.
“They are real Olympians!” assures Sofia Elizabeth to AFP, a 22-year-old American influencer who has engaged in conversation with several athletes on Hinge.
She says she feels a real “connection” with an American swimmer in particular.
When her precious “match” won a gold medal, the young woman published a video which now has more than 20 million views on her TikTok and Instagram accounts.
“I said to myself: it’s a love story“, jokes the American from California, still in contact with the Olympic champion.
No need to be in the Paris region or in the stadiums or fan zones to virtually find the athletes: Sofia has indicated a specific search perimeter on the application, here the Olympic Village, in Saint-Denis. A tip published by the English influencer Lydia Victoriia the day before the opening ceremony and reshared en masse on social networks.
“I have +matched+ with several of them, which is completely crazy to me.” enthuses the 29-year-old, who paid £9.99 (€11.64) to get this option on Tinder.
The use of the “Tinder Passport” option to the main tourist sites in Paris thus jumped by 105% in July, according to the application, with users from the United States at the forefront, followed by Brazil and Turkey.
Tinder had already seen its usage increase by 350% at the Pyeongchang Winter Games (South Korea) in 2018.
Precautions
However, caution is still required for dating apps, including Grindr, dedicated to homosexual encounters, which has deactivated the location options for profiles in the Olympic Village to ensure the safety of athletes.
“If an athlete is not +out+ (openly gay) or comes from a country where being a member of the LGBTQ+ community is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being unmasked by curious people who might try to identify them.“, recalled the American dating app in July.
A restriction already in force during the Beijing Winter Games in 2022, while homosexual relations are still criminalized in a third of the world’s countries, according to a report by the ILGA World association published in May 2024.
Another precaution is the distribution of some 240,000 condoms to Olympic athletes this year. A tradition since the 1988 Olympics to combat sexually transmitted diseases.