Organizers designed the Olympic Village to be an eco-friendly habitation that would prioritize oneness with the environment. Well, in a sense, they achieved that. Olympic athletes are so miserable in the Olympic Village that they are embracing sleeping outdoors in the environment.
Thomas Ceccon, an Italian swimmer who won gold in the 100-meter backstroke, didn’t even qualify for the 200-meter because he said he was “too tired.”
“It’s hard to sleep both at night and in the afternoon,” Ceccon said after the 200-meter. “Here, I really struggle between the heat and the noise.”
Saudi rower Husein Alireza spotted Ceccon lying on a sheet beside a bench on the lawn outside his building. What was Ceccon doing? According to the Italian swimmer, he was taking a “nap.”
“There is no air conditioning in the village, it’s hot, the food is bad,” Ceccon explained. “Many athletes move for this reason. It’s not an alibi or an excuse; it’s the reality of what perhaps not everybody knows.”
Ceccon is far from the first Olympian to complain about the Olympic lodgings and cuisine.
Organizers were forced to order over 4,000 pounds of meat and eggs after protein-starved athletes complained about the fake meat and no-dairy vegan diet in the Olympic Village. The lack of air conditioning and “anti-sex” beds, which have been likened to sleeping on cardboard, have forced many athletes to move to nearby hotels.
The lack of air conditioning, in particular, was a cause of pride for organizers who championed the sufficiency of eco-friendly design and shot down any talk of the need for traditional air conditioning,
“We designed these buildings so that they would be comfortable places to live in in the summer, in 2024 and later on, and we don’t need air conditioning in these buildings because we oriented the facades so that they wouldn’t get too much sun during the summer, and the facades, the insulation is really efficient,” said Olympic venues and infrastructure chief Yann Krysinski in March.
Well, apparently not.