Rebecca Torr waves to the crowd after her run in the snowboard slopestyle semi-finals .
Little did Kiwi snowboarder Rebecca Torr know when she made a few humorous tweets about trying to find love that it would escalate into an international news story.
But such is the intense media glare at the Sochi Olympics that when she took to Twitter to say she was looking for love on Tinder, it made international headlines.
Tinder is a location-based matchmaking app for smartphones, which is used by many to meet with people for one-night stands, but also to try and find an appropriate love match.
The first tweet from Torr was on January 31, when she tweeted: “Can’t wait to tinder in the Olympic village in Sochi”.
But the tweet which really garnered attention was this one two days later: “It seems so far that not many Olympians use tinder…. Just wanna match with the Jamaican bobsled team”.
That tweet made the Olympic Village daily newspaper and from there featured in news stories in the Daily Mail, New York Daily News and Business Insider Australia.
She told Breakfast this morning the joke had really got out of hand.
“A lot of the things I say on twitter aren’t serious.
“I was trying to be funny but I think people took it seriously.
“I guess any press is good press.”
She even had a Russian athlete question how seriously she was taking the Olympics if all she was here to do was find love, she said.
She also joked a potential sponsorship deal with Tinder was in the offing.
“I’m always up for a laugh but I’m hoping Tinder might want to do a sponsorship deal with me.”
It seems there could be a small chance of this with the Tinder twitter account tweeting Torr this morning: @possumtorr How many matches did you get in #Sochi so far? 🙂 Keep Tindering! xx”
Whether or not Torr’s love pursuit was actually real, romantic encounters are nothing new in Olympic Villages.
The Daily Mail reported the 2012 London Village was “a hotbed of sexual activity, with athletes from every discipline and every nationality making the most of their time together”.
– © Fairfax NZ News
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