Every time the Olympics are held, the Olympic Village becomes infamous as a place for athletes to hook up. This year, as previously reported, such fraternizing is being discouraged and the distributed condoms are officially recommended as mementos for athletes to take home rather than use during the Games.
Not so for the tens of thousands of other people coming to Tokyo as part of the entourages.
And as Farrah Akase found, many of them are already in the city and actively going online on Bumble to find locals to hook up with. (Presumably Tinder and other apps are similar.)
Farrah discovered online profiles of dozens of people, including athletes, journalists, project managers, and even a chef. On Twitter, she shared screen grabs (with some parts censored to protect privacy).
In their profiles, they say they are in Tokyo for a month or so for the Olympics. Sometimes they don’t mention the O-word but are wearing uniforms in their photos.
Far be it for this blog to moralize, let alone condemn these people. The people are simply looking for some fun during their trip to Japan for the Olympics.
But residents are obviously concerned about the rising infection numbers, which are creeping back to their peak in winter 2020/21. The Olympics organizers and politicians had reassured the public that there would be minimal intermingling between the visitors and the general public.
Although the visitors are tested very regular and most are vaccinated, they are nonetheless bound to be some carriers among them — and testing has revealed some COVID cases already — which could easily spread to staff at the hotels, Olympic venues, and so on.
The truth is that the quarantine periods are much shorter than those imposed on ordinary citizens and not really enforced. We have seen some obviously Olympics-related people on errands into central Tokyo. This understandably makes people uneasy, given the variants that are now spreading. While the Olympic athletes are semi-trapped at the village in Harumi, the media and staff are wandering free around the city — and looking for fun with locals, currently less than 20% of whom are fully vaccinated.
The issue is whether or not the horny visitors will unintentionally pass anything on to the people they pick up for dates.
