- Second Olympics where beds in athletes village will be made from cardboard
- Part of efforts to make the Olympics more sustainable
- Athletes have taken to social media to show that the beds are robust
The Olympic Games in Paris begin later this week and again the talk in the build up is about the beds athletes have been supplied with, but one rumor about them has been debunked by athletes themselves.
Alleged reason
The beds in the athletes village are made from cardboard, which – allegedly – is to prevent athletes getting, ahem, intimate with each other over the course of the 16 days the Games are on.
But athletes, such as Irish gymnast Rhys McClenaghan, have taken to social media to post videos about how this is nonsense and the beds are more than robust. In a video on his Instagram feed, Rhys takes on the rumor.
“Once again we have these cardboard ‘anti-sex’ beds when I tested them last time, they withstood my testing. Perhaps I wasn’t vigorous enough,” he says, and proceeds to vigorously jump up and down on the bed, which withstands all he efforts.
“They pass the test – it is fake! Fake News!” he adds triumphantly.
Debunked again
As McClenaghan alluded to, this isn’t the first Olympics where this rumor has surfaced. Beds made from recycled cardboard were at the Tokyo Games in 2021, and then US athlete Paul Chelimo claimed that the reason for this was to prevent intimacy as they would collapse under the weight of more than one person.
However, the reason for the cardboard beds is more prosaic – it is part of ongoing efforts to make the Games more sustainable. There are plenty of other initiatives to reduce the Games’ impact on the environment, such as coffee tables made from recycled shuttlecocks and an expanded plant-based menu for athletes.
