The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris have been officially opened. More then ever nutrition is an important topic for athletes as awareness of the impact of nutrition has improved. Nutrition is a very important part of the athlete’s routine and preparation, and there are many links between nutrition and performance or recovery. Many athletes have travelled from far and have left the foods they are used to, behind. Now they have to rely on what the organisers of the Games supply.
Catering for athletes from all over the world
The organisers have quite a challenge. Feeding 15,000 athletes plus staff in is no small feat. They need to serve up to 60,000 meals per day for athletes and staff who come from different cultural backgrounds, have different habits, different athletic demands and restrictions. The Dutch want bread and cheese and quark, the Americans, English and Irish want porridge not baguettes and pain au chocolat, the Japanese want miso, the Koreans kimchi, the list is endless. The caterers need to supply a huge variety of food, as quickly as possible, in a safe and tasteful way.
This is far from easy, and we know from previous Olympic Games that it will take a few days to dial everything in. Paris is no exception; in the first few days before the official opening of the Olympic Games, athletes have been complaining about the lack of food and sometimes also about the quality, with reports of raw meat being served. Catering has repeatedly ran out of important items like certain carbohydrate sources, as well as chicken, eggs and meat. As happens at almost every Games, the catering companies seem surprised by the fact that athletes eat more than their average customers. They have been hearing this message for months and years in the lead up to the Games, as they have advisors who have extensive experience catering for athletes. These messages have not been heard, or were ignored, and thus Paris made the same mistakes as other hosts before.
The fact that the catering is running out of chicken, eggs and meat is maybe not surprising. The Paris 2024 organisation has a target that would make it one of the most sustainable (or least unsustainable) Games ever. They had announced they were going to reduce meat on the menu and provide more plant-based options. This did not seem the best of ideas, because athletes will not change (and should not change) their habits the days before their most important competition.
Dining facilities at the Paris Olympic Games
The organisers in Paris have another challenge, and this is the building that was selected as the dining facility. The dining hall, centrally located in the Olympic village, is a historic building that once was a power plant and was then turned into a film studio. Now it is a network of six restaurants that will serve athletes around the clock. The name “restaurant” was purposefully chosen by the organising committee because they want to showcase “French cuisine”. But combining fine dining and French cuisine (or any cuisine for that matter) with providing 15,000 athletes with food, whilst also taking care of all the different cultural, and athletic demands, within certain budget restrictions has proven to be difficult.
The building is not set up for preparing meals and those meals will have to be supplied by food preparation facilities outside the village, transported to the village and then heated up and displayed. This supply has clearly a limiting factor in the first few days of the Games. The building is also long and narrow, and this makes it even more challenging to manage the large number of athletes and staff that eat at the dining hall. As a result, athletes have been forced to eat outside the Olympic Village and some countries, like Great Britain, have flown in their own chefs.
Hopefully the problems in the first few days with both quality and quantity of food will be quickly resolved and maybe the organisers of the next Olympic Games will listen and learn and maybe, just maybe, we can have an Olympic Games that really caters to the needs of athletes and takes on board the advice they receive in the lead up to the Games.
Asker Jeukendrup works with TeamNL (and the Dutch Olympic Committee) as performance manager nutrition, but the views expressed here are his own.
