Man Sets His Tinder Location To Olympic Village To Date An Athlete ─ And Gets Responses
Going for gold.
YouTube / PhotographerIncognito / Shutterstock With the Tokyo Olympics in full swing, it will come as no surprise that international athletes have some new secret admirers.
But one sports fan is getting extra creative in his bid to bag himself an Olympian as a girlfriend.
The man took to TikTok to share his hack for matching with Olympians.
One TikToker used Tinder Plus to match with Olympians.
In a video that has been viewed over 6 million times, Reed Kavner took a swipe around Tokyo’s Olympic village to find new matches.
"I paid for Tinder Plus so I can swipe in the Olympic Village and date an Olympian," Kavner explaind in the TikTok while screen-recording Tinder’s in-app geofilter as he set his location to the village.
Tinder’s premium subscriptions come with a Passport feature that allows users to find matches in faraway lands.
Kavner also shows some of the female athletes that appeared on his Tinder, including accounts claiming to be Estonian biathlete Grete Gaim, Dutch rower Lisa Scheenard, and Canadian swimmer Katerine Savard.
Katerine Savard responded to the Tinder user.
While Kavner didn’t disclose his success rate within the app, his tactics certainly appear to have caught Savard’s attention.
The Olympic swimmer commented on Kavner’s video with a series of laughing emojis and “j’adore.”
However, Kavner later joked on Twitter that even all his TikTok views had not garnered many DMs, so perhaps the tactic wasn’t so clever after all.
Tinder is popular at the Olympics.
Though Kavner’s video may have been the first of its kind for this year's games, he’s not the first to try out Tinder’s Passport feature in an Olympic village.
In 2018, during the Winter Olympics in South Korea, Tinder’s data showed an 1,850 percent increase in users transporting themselves to the Olympic village in Pyeongchang.
There was also a 348 percent increase in overall app usage.
Kavner’s video and tweets show that this year could be on track for a similar increase.
Tinder’s ongoing popularity in the Olympic village continues in spite of the attempts to limit sexual contact at the Games.
As with previous years, Japanese organizers handed out condoms to those staying in the Olympic village but issued a warning to athletes to refrain from using the supplies, citing fears about the rampant spread of Covid-19 in Japan.
Condoms have been handed out at the Games since 1988 to raise awareness about the spread of HIV and AIDs.
Organizers urged this year’s competitors to take the condoms home as souvenirs. They must also follow social distancing guidelines and abide by bans on handshakes, high-fives and other types of physical, close contact.
These regulations also prompted rumors that the beds in the Village were specially designed to prevent sex; however, this has been disproven.
Alice Kelly is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Catch her covering all things social justice, news, and entertainment. Keep up with her Twitter for more.