Happy Valentine's Day: The Olympic Village has already run out of condoms

The Olympics condom situation has been a long-running source of fascination surrounding the Games dating back to 1988, when the Seoul Summer Games began distributing them to competitors as part of a campaign to raise awareness of sexually transmitted diseases amongst participants. (Turns out, shock of shocks, that when you take several thousand of the fittest 20-year-olds on the planet and dump them into the world’s largest pressure cooker, some things are apparently inevitable.)

But now it seems like Italian organizers may have underestimated the sheer horny force of hordes of high-performance snowboarders, figure skaters, and ice lugers in close proximity to each other. The NYT reports that—in contrast to the 2024 Games in Paris, where a reported 300,000 condoms were handed out—less than 10,000 were distributed to the nearly 3,000 athletes participating in Cortina d’Ampezzo. We’re not mathematicians, but dividing that out over about 20 days of competition seems like it would produce a rationing mindset that simply sits ill at ease with the pursuit of planetary athletic excellence. Just listen to this desperate message from La Stampa‘s anonymous source, who manages to sound like a long-stranded colonist in a dystopian sci-fi movie: “The supplies ran out in just three days,” they told the press. “They promised us more will arrive, but who knows when.”