Are there really only three days left of the Olympics? That might actually be beneficial for me. I’m pretty sure I qualify for federal assistance at this point, because I guarantee you that I’m addicted. If you haven’t been watching it as religiously as I have though, you might not realize that many of the athletes stay in what’s called the Olympic Village. And do you know what they have there? Freebies upon freebies upon glorious freebies.
So while you and I have zero access to them, I thought it might be cool to list the awesome freebies that some of the world’s finest athletes are enjoying right now.
Free Food
You’d think that elite athletes would eat nothing but healthy food during their training and for the most part, you’d be correct. However, since it takes a ton of work to make it to the Olympics, most athletes tend to take a break once they’re finished competing and enjoy the finer aspects of dining. As Australian swimmer Melanie Schlanger put it, “There are vending machines everywhere, and the dining hall has McDonalds, as well as piles of Snickers bars and freezers full of ice creams.” If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s eating unlimited amounts of Snickers. In fact, they should make that an Olympic event just so I could go and win a few medals.
Of course, there’s more than just junk food and candy. The Village has a ginormous cafeteria stocked with every food imaginable: fresh fruits, veggies, meat, breads, drinks, and everything else imaginable. If they don’t have what you want, chances are one of the dozens of chefs cooking will be able to whip it up for you. As a matter of fact, I tried to apply for a spot as one of the chefs, but was told that my peanut butter & jelly sandwich specialty was already covered by somebody else.
The athletes don’t have to worry about tainted food, either. After fears that commonly used pesticides and growth hormones might seep into the foods and trigger false positives during Olympic drug testing, China set up hundreds of organic farms to specifically grow food for the Olympians. However, they even went one step further and set up a tracking system for every single food item. So if a track star from Uganda thinks that carrot he just ate tasted a little funny, it’ll be no trouble to track it’s history and see where it was grown and who handled it.
A quick side note: guess how many apples will be eaten in the cafeteria? An estimated one million. Or to put it another way, they’ll eat about 936,000 bananas, which is enough to circle the Olympic marathon route more than three times. (Photo from China Daily)
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