Olympics condoms
Every two years (since 1988) there is at least one round of stories about condoms at the Olympics (here’s a couple of past StatsChat posts).
Many athletes would have the funds and general executive function to be able to acquire condoms for themselves, and it’s clear that a big part of the point is safe-sex advertising. It’s relatively difficult to get a positive story about condom use into the world’s prestige press, and the Olympics are an opportunity.
Usually the story is about oversupply (450,000 in Rio!, 200,000 Olympics-branded ones in Paris!). For a couple of Olympics the story was about social distancing (Tokyo had 110,000, but they were officially just souvenirs).
This year the story is undersupply: Milano/Cortina apparently had a mere 10,000 condoms, which ran out on day 3. It’s possible that this is a planning failure, like the nearly-finished cable car, but it might also be that the whole advertising mission of the Olympic condoms is losing its urgency.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »