The Olympic village at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games ran out of free condoms within just three days. (Photo by Marta Carenzi/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)
Olympic Village runs out of free condoms in just three days
Well, this condom shortage may give you an idea of what many athletes in Milan Cortina, Italy, are doing with their free time at the 2026 Winter Olympics. The answer may be each other.
That's assuming that you don't have folks making an absurd number of balloon animals or repeatedly trying the "Condom Snorting Challenge". The Olympic Village there has already run out of all the free condoms that it provided Olympic competitors, based on reporting from the Italian newspaper La Stampa. And the speed at which this shortage has occurred has made this a record-breaking Olympics in that sense.
The Olympic Village Provided Around 10,000 Free Condoms
The whole situation, as it stands, apparently has athletes saying con-damn it. La Stampa quoted an athlete as saying, "The supplies ran out in just three days. They promised us more will arrive, but who knows when." Basically, the original supply of around 10,000 condoms did not stretch very long, as the Olympics are scheduled to go a total of 17 days. Getting so many more condoms soon enough to cover the rest of the competition could be, shall we say, a rather hard problem to solve.
This year's Winter Olympics has around 2,900 athletes from 92 different national committees participating in 116 different events across 16 disciplines. These 2026 games do have the highest percentage of female athletes (47%) in Winter Games history. So, if you do the math, the long and the short of it is that at least 1500 different penises could call for some coverage.
If each Olympian penis were using condoms at the same rate, that would mean that each penis would have used 6.67 condoms in just three days to bring about the shortage. Let's round it up to seven condoms in three days, because no one should be using just two-thirds of a condom. That would come out to at least two condoms per day for each penis.
A week ago, ice dancer Olivia Smart from Team Spain offered a little TikTok tour of the supplies available in the Olympic Village. And in that tour, she showed a little station that was erected for the Olympic condoms:
[ TikTok video embed ]
That may have supplied some perspective. But those supplies apparently didn't last long.
February 13 Is International Condom Day
Now, if you think that people in Olympic Village have been wearing these condoms simply as little shower caps, you may need to re-take sex ed or at least pay more attention to International Condom Day, which ironically falls on February 13. That's right, it's today, otherwise known as "Desperation Day."
The purpose of ICD is to raise awareness about the many benefits of regular condom use. Wearing a condom properly can prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV. It can also keep you from making what could be the mistake of a lifetime: an unintended pregnancy. It's no coincidence that this day comes right before Valentine's Day, because guess WTF many people do on February 14?
ICD exists also to promote the proper use of condoms. Essentially, you don't want to "rubber" the wrong way. That could lead to disease exposure and leakage of the condom.
Making condoms freely available certainly makes people more likely to use them. That's because the harder it is to find a condom, well, you get the picture. This certainly isn't the first time Olympic game organizers have offered such freebies. You could call this a rubber Seoul practice since the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea, were the first games to hand out free condoms.
This practice has continued since then. Things got Rio big in 2016. That's when the Rio Summer Olympics provided the highest number of condoms per athlete ever in Olympics history, as I covered then in Forbes: 42. Yes, you heard that correctly, 42 condoms per athlete.
Condom Use Suggests That Winter Olympians Are Having Sex
It shouldn't be a giant surprise that athletes are doing the double luge, face off or ski pole sex thing in the Olympic Village. Sure there is air hockey, piano and smoothies available in the Olympic Village. But there are also a lot of people there. And you can imagine what many people think about when they are around others. Wrap the people in spandex, muscles and competitive tension and you can imagine a lot of stumbling around the cucumber patch, so to speak.
Meanwhile, we'll have to keep abreast of this hard-hitting story and see if and when more condoms arrive. You don't want people foregoing condom use or, gasp, re-using condoms, which is actually a thing that people mistakenly do as I've detailed before in Forbes. A condom is not like a pair of skinny jeans or a bobsled. Mistaking it for one of those things could be a mistake of Olympian proportions.
