With its falsely inflated penises, condom shortages, and real-life heated rivalries, the Milan-Cortina Winter Games delivered headlines and hormones, on and off the ice.
The Olympics have always been about the spectacle of physicality and eroticism, dating back to its inception in ancient Greece. Marble-like forms were arranged for audiences to gaze upon. Male athletes competed entirely naked as a tribute to Zeus, a practice that symbolized honor, status, and physical perfection as an expression of moral excellence. Before competing, they oiled their bodies—ostensibly to protect the skin, but also to catch the light, accentuating every line of muscle. They paraded through the stadium like peacocks, openly inviting the crowd to admire them. The word gymnasium, the place where they trained, is derived from the Greek word for “naked.” The erotic gaze wasn’t a byproduct, it was built into the spectacle.
Set against the operatic mountains of Italy, homeland of Romeo and Juliet and centuries of Catholic repression, the steam emitted from the 2026 Winter Olympics came early. Before the Opening Ceremony even lit the torch, “Penisgate” was going viral. Male ski jumpers were allegedly artificially enlarging their crotch areas—stuffing underwear and, in some cases, injecting hyaluronic acid into their penises—to stretch their suits and gain an aerodynamic edge.In the pursuit of performance, elite sport has always rewarded marginal gains. As much as this scandal was about cheating, it was about reshaping the body (or bulge) itself.
In the months leading up to Milan-Cortina, romance and winter sports were already wet in the public imagination. HBO’s hockey romance Heated Rivalry had the culture in a chokehold. Audiences devoured its slow-burn locker room tension and homoerotic longing disguised as competition. The show’s stars were even named official Olympic torchbearers, a role traditionally reserved for actual athletes. We were being edged sports smut, the narrative going into the games was that they might be like Heated Rivalry, where top athletes were sharing hotel room numbers on the bench.
It’s not just the Heated Rivalry effect, though. The Winter Olympics have always traded in intimacy. Figure skating remains the most obvious example—elite athleticism choreographed into something undeniably sensual. In ice dance, especially, two bodies perform connection on purpose: eye contact held a beat too long, fingers splayed across a hip, and blades carving synchronized arcs into frozen water.
No pair embodied that tension more than Madison Chock and Evan Bates. Married in 2024 and skating together for over 15 years, the most decorated ice dance team in U.S. history moved with the comfortability of people who enjoyed being watched. Their lifts were precise but sultry—his grip firm at her waist, her body folding into his before unfurling skyward. In their matador-inspired routine in the free dance event, Chock straddled Bates in a moment that felt less like choreography than controlled seduction: bull and matador circling, provoking, closing the distance while the audience watched the tension rise.
But Milan-Cortina’s erotic charge wasn’t strictly performative. Real-life romance proliferated across the Village, including a plot worthy of Heated Rivalry. Finland’s women’s hockey star Ronja Savolainen faced her fiancée, Sweden’s Anna Kjellbin, as their teams met as rivals. The U.S. women’s hockey captain Hilary Knight proposed to speedskater Brittany Bowe inside the Olympic Village. After her gold-medal run, skier Breezy Johnson was met at the finish line with a surprise proposal from her boyfriend and now finaceé. Former rivals Jean-Luc Baker and Olivia Smart, who competed against each other in Beijing in 2022, got engaged on Valentine’s Day.
Even the Opening Ceremony got into the mood, staging a sequence inspired by Antonio Canova’s sculpture Cupid and Psyche—an homage to erotic devotion rendered in marble. It was a reminder that Western sport and Western art share a common obsession: the idealized body, suspended between discipline and desire.
And if we need more proof, look no further than the condoms.. The Olympic Village distributed 10,000 condoms to athletes, a well-known protective measure as our foremost athletes collaborate with their international counterparts. Within three days, they were gone—a record-breaking feat. With nearly 3,000 athletes in attendance, that’s roughly three protected encounters per competitor. Sex at the Olympics isn’t new—it’s practically tradition, maybe even part of the infrastructure. If this happens every Games, Milan-Cortina was simply the one that stopped pretending otherwise.
What the Olympics do is give us permission to look. To gaze. To openly, guiltlessly indulge in the spectacle of bodies at their absolute limit—spandex lacquered onto skin, sequins flickering under stadium lights, aerodynamic padding molding athletes into sleek, almost unreal silhouettes. The costumes both conceal and confess, outlining shoulders, hips, chests, the shifting mechanics beneath the surface. Motion turns fabric into revelation: a thigh extending, a torso twisting, a partner’s hand pressed firmly at the waist. It’s only the latest evolution of the Games’ oiled, naked origins in ancient Greece. We call it admiration. We call it national pride. We call it athletic excellence. But beneath those respectable labels is something simpler, maybe even carnal.
Expected to be the most-watched Winter Games to date, Milan-Cortina didn’t invent this sexual subtext. Between injected enhancements, televised romances, and public proposals, it amplified it (sometimes quite literally). What was revealed is that, behind the patriotism and podiums, the Games are about bodies. About proximity. About the charged spectacle of humans testing their limits in full public view. Voyeurism isn’t a side effect of the Olympics. It’s the architecture—and part of the fun.