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THE 2024 OLYMPICS are kicking off in Paris, with more than 10,500 athletes from 206 IOCs (International Olympic Committees) participating in this edition of the summer games. At this elite level the winning margins are increasingly narrow — and when all else is equal, the difference between gold and silver may come down to something as seemingly simple as what an athlete eats. But of course, what’s on the menu is far from simple.
Operationally, it is a marvel of logistics — at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, for instance, the athletes village had a 2,500-member team working round the clock to serve 60,000 meals a day. At an individual level too, the attention to detail is nothing short of amazing. In these rarefied echelons, elite athletes are likely to take a personalised approach to their nutrition; their diets meticulously planned, tested and often underpinned by the latest research.
However, this meticulous approach to food and diet taken by modern day Olympians is in stark contrast to some of the earliest ancient Greek athletes. Take Charmis, the Spartan winner of the Olympic short sprint in 668BC, who is reported to have eaten a special diet of dried figs throughout the games. Other typical early Olympians lived sparingly on barley bread and cheese!
The ancient Greek trainer Pythagoras (not to be confused with the famous Greek philosopher and mathematician) introduced the concept of eating meat into the diets of athletes in the middle of the fifth century. And from there athletes didn’t look back. One of the first to incorporate meat into his training diet was middle distance runner Dromeus of Stymhalos. He had two victories in the dolichos (long-foot race) at both Olympia and the Pythian Games, three at Isthmian, and five victories at the Nemian games — which led to meat being seriously considered as a nutritional strategy.
The first detailed recording of dietary intakes during the modern Olympic games didn’t appear until the 1936 Berlin Games. Here, a study of athletes’ diets found that many would dine on two steaks a meal, and sometimes poultry — with nearly half a kilogram of meat eaten daily — while pre-event meals consisted of three steaks, eggs and meat extract.
The study also found that other athletes would stress the importance of high carbohydrate intake with the Brits consuming large quantities of porridge and the Italians pasta. This was further supported with reports that some athletes would eat diets so high in carbohydrate, that they consumed 6,700-7,300 calories a day. Perhaps this was the first indication of sport and event-specific nutrition, but sadly neither of the studies correlated food intake with sporting event or performance outcomes.
It is now known, of course, that one of the most significant ways to enhance endurance performance — such as marathon running — is indeed by eating carbohydrates before a race. Elite endurance athletes are now often advised to eat carbohydrates 24 to 36 hours before competition. For a 65 kg athlete this would work out at 650 grams a day, and would be spread across multiple meals from a variety of carbohydrate sources (think: bread, potatoes, rice or pasta).
Meanwhile, beetroot juice has also received substantial recent interest due to its possible performance boosting effects. Drinking it both before — usually up to 2.5 hours — and after (more than six days) may improve exercise capacity by decreasing the “oxygen cost” — basically the amount of oxygen used in exercise. So by drinking beetroot juice, an athlete can become more economical in their performance.
Ultimately, in the pursuit of Olympic glory, nutrition is just one component in the arsenal that elite athletes have. Since ancient Greece, food has been seen as integral to performance, and with a growing body of evidence showing that performance nutrition can be the difference between places on the podium, it makes sense for athletes to carefully consider what they are putting into their bodies. After all, you are what you eat — and it seems this couldn’t be truer for world class medal winners.
Neil Williams teaches Exercise Physiology and Nutrition at Nottingham Trent University. This article originally appeared on The Conversation. It has been excerpted and republished here under the Creative Commons Licence.
