Lot to chew on with Olympians’ diets
National teams going the extra mile to ensure their athletes can chow down care free
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — 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 highly calibrated fuel they put in their bodies — for energy, health, warmth, a psychological or 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 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, said. “I say as soon as the Games is over, go at it, enjoy, be adventurous.”
Feeding the athletes
The U.S. team has its own chefs and dietitians, as well as two “nutrition centres” here. 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-metre 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 in buffets that include Western, Asian, Korean, Halal, Kosher, vegetarian and gluten-free dishes, David Kihyun Kwak, director of food and beverage at the Pyeongchang Olympics, said.
To determine what to serve, Kwak’s team analyzed data for the past five Olympics and also worked closely with other nations’ nutrition specialists.
The amount of raw ingredients used each day to feed the athletes is staggering: 700 kilograms of beef, 450 kilograms of eggs, 350 kilograms of lamb, 200 kilograms of bacon, 170
kilograms of chicken, 100 kilograms of rice, 3,800 kilograms of fruits and vegetables, about 15,000 pieces of bread and 800 pizzas.
Food safety
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.
Experts examine ingredients closely for possible contamination that could threaten athletes’ health or disrupt doping tests. South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has sent more than a dozen
food safety specialists to take ingredient samples to buses equipped with fast-testing laboratories to look for potential problems before the food even gets eaten.
Home cooking
Riikka Valila, at 44 the oldest women’s hockey player in Olympic history, likes the food options, but misses the “really good bread” back in Finland. She said some of her teammates on gluten-free diets have brought food from home.
The Americans shipped over 85 pallets filled with pasta, sauces, peanut butter, grains and plants like quinoa and spices, Parker-Simmons said.
There’s food meant to help with performance and recovery, but there’s also “psychological food,” which Parker-Simmons explains like this: Say an athlete training her whole life for the Olympics fails. She takes it hard; she stops eating. This is when the dietitians will turn to something special — a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, maybe, or Cheez-Its.
Vincent Zhou, a U.S. figure skater, said he needs a lot of carbs “before, between and after sessions” to fend off fatigue. “It hasn’t been very difficult finding comfort food,” he said.
Eating for performance
The work to optimize nutrition can seem as thorough as the work to perfect sports skills.
Dietitians have to regularly test cross-country skiers, for instance, who have the highest energy expenditure of any sport in the world, Parker-Simmons said. An average-sized woman will need 4,000 calories or more per day to train and compete; a typical man needs about 7,000 calories, she said. Ski jumpers, on the other hand, sometimes have to drop 10 kilograms below their natural body weight, while keeping up their muscle mass and energy.
Fans split on Korean food
Foreign fans, of course, have their own food worries and routines.
South Korean officials have tried to provide menus in English and other languages for thousands of local restaurants. And the Korea Tourist Organization has published a brochure, complete with a hotline in English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, that outlines “must-eat” dishes and where to find them.
Some tourists embrace the exotic. Others play it safe. Very safe.
“We found Papa John’s (pizza) today, which was literally life changing because ... we haven’t eaten a lot for the last few days,” Rachel Basford, 31, of Kent, England, said while drinking in a fried chicken restaurant.