[Even before the Sochi Winter Olympics started a story surfaced about how the US team was being denied the yoghurt that was part of its diet. A shipment of Chobani yogurt which was meant for the team was embargoed by Russian authorities who questioned if it met the standards for yoghurt in Russia.
This seems a bit odd, not least because no Russians would be eating this yoghurt, but it was a reminder how food issues have often featured at the Olympics. This two part piece was written at the time of the London Olympics and looks at some of the food issues that have been served up at past Olympics]
As London gears up to present the 30th Olympiad it is worth remembering that they might owe the honour, in some small part, to the well-known awfulness of English food. This goes back to Singapore in 2005 when the International Olympic Committee met to decide the 2012 venue.
Everyone knew it was a close race between London and Paris and the then French President Jacques Chirac had come by to pitch for his capital. And what better way, he must have thought, than compare its legendary food with what was available across the Channel. He is reported to have said, “We can't trust people who have such bad food. After Finland, it's the country with the worst food.” For Chirac this just seemed self-evident, but it may have helped cement a dislike for French arrogance, as well as cost it any votes they might have got from the Finns. London got the Games, and this year’s Olympians are apparently getting the best of British food.
Which might be just what they need. What Chirac got wrong was that, while food is certainly vital for the Olympics, it doesn’t have to be fancy. For highly trained athletes nutrition is generally not a matter of pleasure, but of getting exactly the required amount of calories and nutrients needed for optimum performance. The diets of top athletes tend to consist of simple and functional food – pasta features a lot. Olympic champions have often been rumoured to have special diets. For example, the Flying Finn, Paavo Nurmi, who between 1920-28 won nine gold medals for running, was said to be powered by raw fish and black bread; when actually asked, his more prosaic answer was that he trained on oatmeal.
British food then, which is at its best when simply prepared from top quality ingredients, might be well received (and with chicken tikka masala described as Britain’s national dish, it is no longer that bland). The catering estimates this year include 25,000 loaves of bread, 232 tonnes of potatoes, 82 tonnes of seafood, 31 tonnes of poultry items, 75,000 litres of milk, 19 tonnes of eggs, and more than 330 tonnes of fruit and vegetables – a large part of which will be sourced locally and sustainably, in line with current thinking on food and the environment.
It will be a challenge, but then supplying the Olympics always have been. According to ‘Food for Athletes and Gods’, an essay by Jane M.Renfrew on the diet of the ancient Olympics, “Olympia was situated in a fairly remote and underpopulated part of the Peloponnese and since there was no large permanent settlement there, everything in the way of food had to be brought in to support the whole festival.” The original diets were mostly vegetarian – vegetable soup, barley and wheat bread, fresh cheese, olives, fruit, plus fresh and dried fish.
But according to the historian Pausanius in 480 BCE Dromeus of Stymphalos won the long distance race after training on a mostly meat diet, and that may have inspired other athletes to shift to non-veg food. The Games were high-prestige by then and Greek city states were willing to splurge on their heroes. Philostratos, who wrote the earliest athletics manual, wrote disapprovingly that “they brought in luxurious chefs and caterers by whom men were made into epicures and gluttons…” In any case, meat was hardly in short supply in Olympia because, as an important religious as well as sporting event, it featured many sacrifices of animals to the gods. On the morning of the middle day of the Olympiad alone, 100 oxen were sacrificed on the altar of Zeus.
The modern Olympics may not feature animal sacrifice, but food has generally been lavish. The two notable exceptions were, as might be expected, the Games held immediately after the two World Wars. At Antwerp in 1920 the athletes were crammed into rooms crowded with cots and forced to eat a lot of canned food, prompting the Americans to send a formal protest to their sporting authorities at having to perform under such conditions. But it was the last London games, in 1948, dubbed the “Austerity Olympics” which faced the biggest food problems, and politics played a role.
Food rationing was still very much in force in the UK and some generous Americans suggested that they feed all the athletes. But the Russians objected, with the Soviet magazine Ogonyok dubbing it a “Pork Trick” to bring profits to American pork producing capitalists and also suggesting it was meant to be a face-saver if the Americans lost – they could always claim it was their food which powered the winners! The offer was withdrawn and the Americans flew over 5000 steaks and 15,000 chocolate bars just for their own athletes (but handed over the surplus to hospitals). The Argentines brought 100 tonnes of meat, the Dutch brought fruit and vegetables and Iceland brought frozen mutton.
I don’t know if the Indians, who were competing as an independent nation for the first time, took along their own ghee, rotis and rice, but whatever they ate it was enough to help them win an Olympic hockey gold. We can only hope that on this return to a London no longer suffering from food shortages that our current Olympic team can find the sustenance to power them to similar victories.
Vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com
