Whoa, the Olympics kind of snuck up on me this time around! For anybody new to the games, you might not realize that most Olympics 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 some of the awesome freebies that the world's finest athletes are enjoying right now at the Paris 2024 Olympic games and beyond!
Note: I originally published this for the Beijing 2008 games, but I've updated it with new information and links every two years since!
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 Dutch rower Michiel Bartman put it:
The most fun thing I remember from the Olympic Village was the food court. It was huge, almost the size of two football fields, and great. So many choices of different and delicious food; you could try every night something else. McDonald’s is one of International Olympic Committee sponsors and were prominently placed in the food court as well.
Irish rugby player Harry McNulty shows a bit more of the cafeteria option in Tokyo 2021 when he took us on a tour in this video.
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 his carrots taste a little funny, it'll be no trouble tracking their history to see where they were grown and who handled them.
A quick side note: guess how many apples were eaten in the Beijing 2008 cafeteria? An estimated one million. Or to put it another way, they ate about 936,000 bananas, which is enough to circle the Olympic marathon route more than three times.
