• By
  • Ben Cohen
American slopestyle snowboarder Jamie Anderson said Tinder was ‘next level’ among Olympians in Sochi.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

You’re young, you’re a world-class physical specimen, you’re living in a fenced-in village full of similar people from all over the world who are dying to meet you, and it’s Valentine’s Day.

Clearly, you need a matchmaking app.

Since the beginning of the Games in Sochi, the founder of one such app says his company’s internal statistics suggest that athletes, or some combination of athletes, fans and volunteers, are using his product to make lots of new friends.

Tinder has seen a 400% day-over-day increase of new users in Sochi since the Olympics opened Friday, Sean Rad says, with numbers now in the thousands. “We didn’t have a lot of activity in Sochi before the Olympics,” he said. In the last week, though, the host city became “one of those areas for us that have great penetration and usage.”

Released in 2012, after the London Games, Tinder connects people to others in their geographical vicinity. A user’s first name, photos, age and interests pop up on another user’s phone screen, and Tinder plays Cupid if both users like what they see enough to swipe to the right on their phones, allowing them to talk with each other in a chat window. From there: Who knows?

Tinder’s presence in Sochi, particularly among athletes, was revealed in part by Jamie Anderson, the 23-year-old American snowboarder who won a slopestyle gold medal Sunday. She told Us Weekly afterward that Tinder was such a distraction that she had to delete it from her phone. The average user spends 77 minutes a day with Tinder, said Rad.

“Tinder in the Olympic Village is next level,” Anderson said, according to the magazine.

Grindr, a similar app for men that reports 55,000 monthly active users in Russia, says it has seen a climb to 541 active users in Sochi from 185 since the opening ceremony. “In countries where an openly gay culture is lacking or forbidden, Grindr is often the only way for gays to be able to communicate with each other,” Grindr founder Joel Simkhai said in a statement. (Russia recently passed a law prohibiting “gay propaganda.” President Vladimir Putin said before the Games that gays would be welcome in Sochi.)

The companies have no way of parsing what percentage of their users are Olympians. Tinder usage has a history of picking up in other temporarily high-density areas, such as music festivals. The company is expecting a similar bump when Brazil hosts the World Cup this summer.


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