This summer’s 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will bring an end to the sex ban introduced in 2021 as a result of the Covid pandemic. In anticipation of the ban’s lifting, the 2024 Paris Olympics have similarly announced that they will be providing participating athletes with a supply of 300,000 condoms. 

The games, set to kick off in the French capital this July, will bring the event back to its original four-year cycle. A cycle that was interrupted when the 2020 Summer Olympics, set to take place in Tokyo, Japan, were pushed back a year due to the onset of the Covid pandemic. 

The pandemic similarly persuaded the International Olympic Committee to introduce an intimacy ban amongst athletes, in addition to general social distancing guidelines, to prevent the spread of the virus.

Covid lost its pandemic status in May of 2023, a fact that has led the International Olympic Committee to remove their previously established ‘sex ban’ ahead of this summer’s Paris games. Olympic chiefs similarly revealed that they would provide enough condoms so that every participating athlete would receive two condoms per day for the duration of the Olympics, allowing the world’s greatest athletes to enjoy safe sex in the famed city of love. 

In an interview with Sky News, director of the Olympic Village Laurent Michaud said: “the conviviality here is something big.

“Working with the athletes commission, we wanted to create some places where the athletes would feel very enthusiastic and comfortable.”

To achieve this goal, organisers reported that the games would be inclusive for women, LGBTQ+ folks, and the disabled community. 

“‘Games wide open’ [the event’s slogan] has really been our motivation from the start,” said Tony Estanguet, President of the Paris 2024 Organising Committee, in an interview with The Independent. 

“It’s a simple slogan that says exactly what is important for us.”

The provided condoms, however, are not new to the Olympics. In fact, the first time that the Olympic Committee provided athletes with condoms was at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Condoms provisions at the Olympics began as a direct result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the time and similarly encouraged athletes to practice safe sex. 

While Paris’s 300,000 condoms might seem like a large number, it pales in comparison to the 2016 Rio Olympics, which holds the record with a reported 450,000 condoms.