Many dating apps have a global feature that allows users to relocate their match pool to elsewhere in the world — but if you want to use the Explore feature on Grindr to try to hook up with an Olympian, you’re out of luck. However, this blocking of the Olympic Village isn’t for the discriminatory reasons that many may assume. It’s intended to protect athletes’ privacy, due to international LGBTQ+ inclusion laws.
Grindr utilized this same Village-specific blockage during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, posting that the restrictions are intended to protect the privacy of athletes who come from or are competing for countries that are discriminatory towards the queer community.
If an athlete is seen on a gay dating app such as Grindr, they could be outed or exposed by those who find them on the app from around the world, which could have potentially dangerous repercussions if they’re from a country that has outlawed being queer, or even just from an unaccepting community. While the Olympics have the most queer exposure and acceptance that there’s ever been, being out as queer is still a very dangerous thing in many parts of the world.
The concern began at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, during which Nico Hines published an article in The Daily Beast about the usage of dating apps by the Olympians. Grindr was mentioned in the article, and the risk of closeted athletes being exposed came to the forefront. It was circulated that outing closeted athletes at an event where over two hundred athletes hail from countries where “being gay is punishable by death” (via Athlete Ally Executive Director Hudson Taylor) is unethical and dangerous.
Fear not, though. Athletes physically located in the Olympic Village can still use Grindr by disabling certain features such as profile screenshots and recording private videos. Over 175 LGBTQ+ athletes are at the Paris Olympics this summer out of the over-ten-thousand athletes competing, according to OutSports.
