The New Age of Olympic Love

A new dating application called Tinder has seemed to change the dating game for olympic athletes living in the olympic village in Sochi. This was the first time the simple "hot or not" app has been around during the olympics and it created quite a buzz between athletes.

Tinder takes your location and finds all potential matches within a certain radius of yourself. Then the scrolling begins. A person comes up on your phone and if you swipe to the left, it's a no. If you swipe to the right, it's a yes. Say someone also swiped to the right for you, then you will instantly get a notification that you're a match, taking you to a private message to start a conversation if you wish.

Olympic skiing heartthrobs Nick Goepper and Joss Christensen have even admitted being on the app, "It's the normal crew we're used to seeing," said Christensen. "It's all the American's we're used to traveling with, so it's a little weird." Christensen doesn't go much further on Tinder then swiping. He has hasn't initiated a conversation with any other olympic athletes.

Left: Nick Goepper         Right: Joss Christensen

Photo courtesy of @nickgoepper on Instagram

Want to know if your favorite athlete is on Tinder? Well there is a Tumblr page for that! Sochi on Tumblr has Tinder profiles of many different athletes that competed in Sochi over the past two weeks.


Why is Nick Goepper even on Tinder? He has a thousands of girls trying to win a date with him after the conclusion of the Olympics! Using the hashtag #iwanttodatenick on Twitter and Instagram will enter you into the competition. Funny pictures and videos have seen to be catching his attention.

Pictures like this:

But, this girl seems to be the front runner. I mean, she WROTE and SANG him a song!

Now that the Olympics are over, I hope the Olympians got all their Tindering in! I know New Zealand snowboarder Rebecca Possum Torr did...

#BellLetsTalk Goes Viral

On January 28, 2014 a hashtag started making waves on Twitter with everyone from celebrities to athletes to politicians chiming in. That hashtag was #BellLetsTalk. Bell Let's Talk is a Mental Health Initiative started by Bell Canada Enterprise (BCE), the largest communications company in Canada. It encourages people to raise awareness for mental health and end the negative stigma associated with those words.

For every tweet, retweet, and mention of #BellLetsTalk, BCE pledged to donate $.05 to mental health related charities.

It started with Canadian based companies, groups, and people using the hashtag:

   

But quickly athletes, writers, and teams from the NHL started to pick up on the trend and join the conversation about mental health:

 

In the offseason of 2011, the NHL lost three players to mental illness: Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belak. Campaigns like Bell Lets Talk create dialogue about the issues these hockey players faced and that many members of the general population face today. The hockey community rallied around this cause like it was their own, spreading positive messages about mental health all day. 

They even garnered the support from a few celebrities: 

It is always amazing to see a sport come together in support of something other than the game. It shows that the athletes who get paid millions of dollars to play a sport have other things on their mind than the competition. Over $5.4 million was raised on January 28, 2014 because of tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook. And people still say the hockey community is small?

If you'd like more information visit the Bell Lets Talk website!