Food serious business for Olympians
PYEONGCHANG, Korea, Republic Of First, U.S. snowboarding star Chloe Kim tweeted about being “down for some ice cream” while competing in Pyeongchang, then about being “hangry” because she hadn’t finished her breakfast sandwich.
Clearly, food is a big deal for Olympians, and it’s usually much more complicated than ice cream and sandwiches: the very specific, highly calibrated fuel they put in their bodies — for energy, for health, for warmth, for a psychological and physiological edge — is an important part of what makes them excel.
Korean food is some of the world’s finest — savory, salty soups with fish so tender it falls off the bone; thick slabs of grilled pork and beef backed with spicy kimchi that many Korean grandmothers swear cures the common cold. But it’s very different from what many foreign Olympians are used to.
“What I recommend for athletes right now in competition mode is to be as safe as possible. This might happen once in a lifetime; you don’t want to blow it with just having an upset stomach because you’ve eaten something that’s different to what your body’s used to,” Susie Parker-Simmons, a sports dietitian for the U.S. Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said in an interview in Pyeongchang. “I say, as soon as the games is over, go at it; enjoy, be adventurous.”
The U.S. team has its own chefs and dietitians, as well as two “nutrition centres” here. And then there’s the food at two athletes villages, where nearly 3,000 athletes from 90 different countries — most of whom strictly follow unique food routines — get fed.
The goal is to provide lots of everything.
The two villages each have massive, 4,000-square-meter (43,055-square-foot) dining rooms where nearly 500 chefs and cooking assistants provide a combined 18,000 meals per day. Each dining room is open 24 hours a day and offers about 450 different types of food.
The amount of raw ingredients used each day to feed the athletes is staggering: 700 kilograms (1,540 pounds) of beef, 450 kilograms (992 pounds) of eggs, 350 kilograms (771 pounds) of lamb, 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of bacon, 170 kilograms (374 pounds) of chicken, 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of rice, 3,800 kilograms (7,495 pounds) of fruits and vegetables, about 15,000 pieces of bread and 800 pizzas.
Most Olympic athletes don’t eat outside of the villages because of worries about the purity of ingredients, Kwak said. The United States did tests before the 2008 Beijing Olympics that found some local chicken contained enough steroids to trigger positive test results.