Adam Rippon explained that he didn’t hook up inside the notoriously rowdy Olympic Village because Winter Games athletes don’t bring the same kind of heat as those at the Summer Games.
During a Monday, August 25, appearance on Kelly Stafford’s podcast, “The Morning After,” Rippon — who took home a bronze medal in the figure skating team event at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea — was asked about his time in the Village and acknowledged that his answer was going to be “disappointing.”
“Summer and Winter are totally different beasts,” Rippon, 35, explained. “It’s like double the amount of athletes in a Summer Games. It’s also warm and everybody’s hot and naked. In the winter, the most revealing outfit outside of the figure skating event is maybe the hockey uniform. And they’re in helmets and pads.”
Rippon acknowledged he was 28 years old when he competed at the Olympics, saying he was “past that” phase in his life.
Though he was single during his time at the Games, Rippon married his husband, Jussi-Pekka Kajaala, on New Year’s Eve in 2021.
The figure skater also explained it was difficult to get any action because he was sharing a space with “five other people.”
“There have been Olympic Villages in the past that have truly turned to ruins,” Rippon said. “They are made of paper mache and they just fall apart. It’s so expensive to host an Olympics that now they ask cities to have some sort of plan [to make sure] the infrastructure and the money isn’t wasted.”
In Pyeongchang, Rippon said he and other athletes moved into new apartments people had already purchased.
“Everything was covered in plastic,” Rippon recalled. “No refrigerator, no appliances. Not everything was hooked up. But it was to show that the land wouldn’t go to waste. The money for the Olympics was spent to help the citizens of that city.”
He added, “It is kinda funny when you think I waited my whole life to basically be in an Ikea showroom.”
Rippon was also asked about the viral cardboard beds inside recent Olympic Villages, which many athletes have complained about.
“We didn’t have cardboard beds,” he said. “But I will tell you that those cardboard beds, it looks shocking. But again, it’s just an initiative to show you’re not going to have a bunch of s*** and garbage when it’s all done.
Rippon further explained of the cardboard beds, “It’s just the box spring. If it wasn’t cardboard, it’d be a brick.”
