The weird and wonderful diets of Olympic athletes

Analysis: Athletes' diets are usually highly tailored and guided by sports nutritionists and dieticians, but this hasn't always been the case

By Elaine McCarthy, UCC and Kevin McCarthy

At all levels of sport, good nutrition is essential. What an athlete eats and drinks affects their ability to train, recover and ultimately compete.

However, lots of factors affect how athletes eat and the food choices they make. Adults make over 200 decisions daily about what food and beverages they consume. For athletes, these decisions are more complicated. How will their food choices affect sporting performance? Are they trying to gain, maintain or lose weight? Are there any legal or doping considerations when choosing a food or nutritional supplement?

Since the beginning of the Modern Olympics in 1896, athletes have fuelled their bodies to compete. Nowadays, athletes' diets are highly tailored and guided by sports nutritionists/dietitians, but this hasn’t always been the case. Practices have not always been backed by 'science’, sometimes based more on personal perceptions, quirks, or comforts as shown in the following examples.

Thomas Hicks and his stimulants

The marathon at the St Louis Olympics of 1904 was a little shorter than later marathons, at a ‘mere’ 40km or 25 miles, but run in 32°C heat. Knowledge of sports nutrition was particularly rudimentary in those early Games.

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From Great Big Story, the story of the marathon at the 1904 St Louis Olympics

After 16 miles, Tom Hicks was struggling badly so his handlers decided to revive him with a concoction of egg whites and strychnine sulphate, washed down with water. The American runner perked up but began to falter again after 19 miles, so more strychnine sulphate and egg white was administered, this time washed down with a little brandy.

Hicks survived both the ‘nourishment’ and being passed out by an athlete who had taken a spin in a car (soon disqualified), to become the Olympic Marathon champion. Nowadays, strychnine is a commonly used pesticide!

Emil Zátopek, the Bambi of distance running

Emil Zátopek is often described as the greatest distance runner, ever. He remains the only athlete to win the 5,000m, 10,000m and the marathon at the same Olympic Games in 1952 – that marathon, incidentally, was his first.

From British Pathé, Emil Zátopek wins the marathon at the Helsinki Olympic Games, his first ever time running that distance

Zátopek became a great athlete despite enduring food shortages linked to World War II and the Cold War. That doesn’t mean his food choices weren’t a little strange at times.

His friend, the pentathlete Karel Bártȗ once recalled seeing him emerge from the woods where he had been training near Stará Boleslav with green stains around his mouth. Zátopek revealed that he had been eating the leaves of a young birch tree, on the grounds that deer are good at running and these were the deer’s favourite food.

Ryan Lochte's 8,000 calories training diet

US swimmer Ryan Lochte won 12 Olympic medals in all, six of them gold, spread across four Olympics. He would have undoubtedly won several more, had his career not coincided in large part with that of Michael Phelps.

Ryan Lochte beats MIchael Phelps in 2012 Olympics 400 metres to win gold

Your typical adult male is recommended to eat roughly 2,500 calories per day, but Lochte’s training diet could reach 8,000 calories a day at its most intense. That’s a lot of food! His day often began with five or six eggs, with spinach, tomatoes, and ham... and hash browns (or any potatoes). Then there were pancakes and oatmeal, lots of fruit, topped off with French vanilla coffee.

Like many athletes involved in endurance exercise, Lochte frequently employed the practice of carb-loading. This involves consuming a carbohydrate-rich diet to increase the amount of stored energy as glycogen in your muscles. For Lochte, his carb-loading involved a week of spaghetti, fettuccine Alfredo in particular.

Even with all that dietary discipline and focus, Lochte rarely missed a weekly Friday treat of blue-cheese pizza and chicken wings. ‘It's a family tradition", he explained, "and I've been doing this since I was eight years old, and I've only missed it six times in my life.’ Tradition and culture clearly play a role in an athlete’s food choice.

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From RTÉ Sport, Usain Bolt wins his third straight Olympic 100 metres title as he took gold in 9.81 seconds at the Rio Olympics in 2016

Home comforts for Usain Bolt

Usain Bolt won eight Olympic gold medals in all, plus 11 at the World Championships. From childhood, one of the basic elements in Bolt’s diet, according to his father, was yams, a very good source of carbohydrates. However, Bolt admitted ‘my coach wants me to eat a lot of vegetables, so I do eat more of that than anything else. I’ll eat broccoli, but I’m not a big fan.’

Bolt won three golds at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, each with a world record, but his diet wasn’t exactly optimal. He often opted for 100 chicken nuggets per day: ‘In China, the food was different. It was a big canteen and there were a lot of different cuisines, and I’m like, ‘yo, this is not gonna work’. Then they had a McDonald’s set up nearby…’

Frank O’Mara's full Irish

Irish multiple Olympian and double world indoor champion Frank O'Mara would agree with Bolt on the importance of comfort foods. Though always prepared and trained meticulously, O'Mara admitted that one joy of returning to Ireland from his US base was getting a spin back to Shannon Airport from his friend and mentor, the late Ronnie Long.

From RTÉ Archives, Michael Walsh reports for RTÉ News on Frank O'Mara's return to Limerick after winning the IAAF World Indoor Championships Men’s 3000 metres in Indianapolis in 1987

Worried about O'Mara's diet, Long would stuff up to 20 lbs of rashers, sausages and puddings into his bag at the boarding gates. Airport security clearances were somewhat easier back then! When asked if he ate it all back in Arkansas, Frank came clean: ‘I did, and would again’.

Great sports people are fuelled by what they eat. Sometimes, too, they can become great despite what they eat.

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Dr Elaine McCarthy is a Lecturer in Nutrition at the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences and Lead Investigator at the INFANT Research Centre at UCC. Dr Kevin McCarthy is an Irish Olympic historian and author of Gold, Silver and Green: The Irish Olympic Journey 1896-1924.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

From leaves to sausages, the weird and wonderful diets of Olympic athletes