Coco Gauff is highly publicized. The 20-year-old tennis player is the champion of the US Open, one of the flag bearers of Team USA and one of the most sought-after athletes in this year’s Olympic Games.
When he speaks, others pay attention to him. So when Gauff uploaded a video to TikTok from inside the Olympic Village the morning after the Games Opening Ceremony, it’s no surprise that it went viral.
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The footage shows a frenetic scene from the day before: a cramped apartment, full of athletes slotting around every corner, clothes strewn across the floor, ephemeral hairstyles and panic on the faces of competitors racing to get to their Seine River Boat Ride on time.
The video is accompanied by a sound titled “female rage” and the caption reads: “10 girls, two bathrooms. #villageolympique”.
Olympic #villageolympique #juegos
♬ Female Rage – Bel6va
This is the truth about the Paris 2024 Olympic Games: they are the largest sporting event in the world, but most of their star attractions – the athletes themselves – will live in collective housing more suitable for students. In the comments of her TikTok post, Gauff showed that she is the only American tennis player still in the Olympic village.
“All the tennis players moved to a hotel, so now only five girls, two bathrooms,” he wrote. “I have the only room, the roommates are great. “
The first version of the Olympic Village appeared 100 years ago in Paris, with the athletes of 1924 housed in wooden huts and asked to pay fixed rates. Though conditions are undoubtedly better now, athletes still have their complaints.
This is the Olympic Village: from secret delights to the famous cardboard beds.
The Olympic Village is seven kilometers (4. 3 miles) north of central Paris, spread across the suburbs of Saint-Denis, L’Ile-Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine. For just over two weeks, it will host around 14,000 competitions before hosting 8,000 at this month’s Paralympic Games.
They are elite athletes and naturally take advantage of their advantages.
On a 54-hectare (about 540,000 square meter) site, which was once a combination of commercial settings and abandoned buildings, there are bakeries that distribute Parisian baguettes.
Costa Coffee also offers loose drinks to athletes and allows them to upload photos of what they have enjoyed to the coffee machines. A few seconds later, the symbol is recreated in latte art on the surface of the drink. Judging by their posts on social media, many The contest chose pets and people.
There is a grocery store and laundromat on-site (18,000 pounds (8,200 kg) of linen will be processed per day), while a multi-faith center is located at the southern end of the village.
“We are here for anyone who wants to listen,” Tenpa Rabgye, a Buddhist monk who lives in a monastery in southern France, told Time magazine. “Maybe we can help someone in a difficult time when they feel pressured. “
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Access is limited. Only athletes or coaches are allowed to enter, as well as a limited number of family members. There are subdivisions that athletes can access, even beyond the gates.
Each national team has its own host block (or, for smaller countries, its own zone in a shared block), tailored to its specifications.
Perhaps the secret of the Irish team, which may surpass its most productive record in the Olympic Games, lies in the muddy machines in its room. The Dutch have traditional orange bicycles.
Australia took 3 tonnes of tuna, 10,000 muesli bars and 2,400 meatloafs, along with 3 baristas from an award-winning roaster. Downstairs, Tucker Box Bistro offers high-performance nutrition.
One of Paris’s goals is to be the most sustainable Olympic Games ever held (a complicated challenge, given the discreet initial editions, to mention its previous precursors) and the town’s progression is the cornerstone of this.
“This village has been designed as a district that will have life afterward,” said Georgina Grenon, sustainability director for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. “Paris 2024 rents it for a few months. “
After the Paralympic Games on 8 September, the village will be transformed into offices for 6,000 employees and apartments for 6,000 residents, as well as social housing. Several projects are testing sustainable generation (Grenon describes it as a “testing lab”), with a sidewalk made of shells.
If they work, the shells will absorb rain, and stored water will evaporate on hot days to cool those who walk on them.
But some of the reports with sustainable projects have also frustrated athletes, who are asked to go through situations that are more utilitarian than utopian. Knowing that they will be remodeled after the games, the rooms are only furnished, while some athletes were surprised to notice that they had to bring their own toilet paper.
“It’s probably not the moment I imagined I was capable of,” Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus, who won gold in the 400-meter freestyle, said Sunday. “But living in the Olympic Village makes it difficult to perform. It’s not made for peak performance, so it’s a matter of who can keep that combination in mind.
That said, Titmus also complained about the Australian team’s policy of asking athletes to leave the village within 48 hours of their last event to minimize the effect of fellow partygoers on the rest of the competition.
Among the environmental initiatives, the most debatable has been the lack of air conditioning. Instead of traditional cooling units, the apartment has a water-based formula in the walls, capable of cooling the room by up to 10°C (18°F). It sounds good, but athletes are not allowed to use their full diversity and complain that they can only lower the temperature by 2°C.
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Under pressure, the organizers have announced that teams will be able to purchase a traditional air conditioning formula at their own expense; However, some federations are unable to purchase devices and there have been supply problems, leading to accusations of a “two-tier” Olympics.
“There is no air conditioning, just this fan and it’s not enough,” Romanian table tennis player Bernadette Szocs told The Guardian. “It feels too hot in the room. We sleep with the door open at night. The rooms are small and we are two people. “
Some rooms also lack curtains, affecting athletes’ sleep before competition, with American heptathlete Chari Hawkins demonstrating how she used a giant towel to save the others inside while changing.
How to replace the curtains in my room in the Olympic Village.
♬ sound – Chari
Her teammate, open water swimmer Mariah Denigan, had an equal solution.
“There are no blackout curtains in the Olympic Village, that’s not a problem,” he said before showing the sheets he had put up on the windows. “Who said athletes are smart?
Beds are probably the most publicized source of discussion. They are made of cardboard frames for durability, although the rumor that they are meant to deter sex and give in to vigorous movements is false.
Videos have shown that the bed, made from recycled fabrics, is thin but can be flipped between a harder and softer look.
“It sucks,” American gymnastics star Simone Biles wrote on TikTok. “But we have bedspreads, so I hope it gets better. “
Gauff borrowed a bedspread from the archery team, but Biles’ gymnastics partner Frederick Richard had a solution: She took her own bed across the Atlantic.
“I literally like the bed,” bronze medalist British jumper Yasmin Harper told The Athletic. “I like hard beds, so this is wonderful for me. And the town is literally beautiful. It’s literally well set up – it’s almost like anything from the Sims (computer game), it’s almost animated.
Harper is less complimentary about some other facet of village life.
“The food is a little more questionable — the quantity is a little lacking,” he said. “I feel like with food you want texture or flavor, and if there’s neither, it’s a little bit of a problem. “
There is a central café in the centre of the village, open 24 hours a day and serving 40,000 meals each day. But athletes constantly criticize the quality of collective catering, stating that it is not suitable for peak performance. The GB team bosses warned that it was also dangerous.
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“At the start of every game there are two or three problems; the biggest this time is the food in the village, which is not adequate,” said Team GB executive leader Andy Anson. safe foods: eggs, chicken, safe carbohydrates, and then there is the quality of the diet, with raw meat served to athletes. ”
The British athletes went to eat at the country’s external fitness center in Clichy, a 30-minute drive away; Team GB hired an additional chef to meet demand.
The Olympic Village’s caterer, Sodexo Live, told French newspaper L’Equipe that it takes athletes’ court cases seriously and will adapt its materials from certain types of food to meet demand.
However, the food is not good at all: there is one chocolate muffin in particular that has gone viral among athletes on social networks due to its quality. Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen is obsessed.
When Bae is craving a snack #fyp #olympics #paris2024 #olympictiktok #olympicvillage #muffins @Olympics @paris2024
♬ Sound – MyWatchHistory
The other disorders of the village are necessarily the fault of the organizers. For example, even inside of this elite global, hierarchies and fandoms exist. Competitors attempted to spot the biggest stars of the Games, such as Biles, Rafael Nadal, French swimmer Leon Marchand and American track and box star Noah Lyles, the reigning global champion in the 100m.
“I’ve become popular in the town, and unfortunately, that was due to a fair percentage of demanding situations to find my own space, whether it’s dining out or going for a run at the gym,” Lyles said.
“Some athletes like to leave the village and stay in hotels, but I like the total Olympic experience: I don’t want to leave. I’m not even the most popular user in town, so I know I’m not the only one who’s had to deal with conditions like this.
“Now I have dinner at very random times in the back of the cafeteria, just to have my space with my friend (Jamaican sprinter Junelle Bromfield) while we go out to eat. I speak honestly and I am fair to myself.
Not all of them stayed. Like Gauff’s American tennis teammates, the South Korean swimmers approached the pool during their trip.
“Normally it takes 40 to 45 minutes from the village to the stadium, but it took us more than an hour and a half,” Hwang Sun-woo told The Korea Times before comparing the bus to a sauna. “The windows were covered with duct tape, probably because they feared terrorist attacks. But anything will have to be done. “
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The most notable absences are the NBA stars who make up the United States basketball team: they have not been in the Olympic Village since 1992, raising considerations about protection and comfort.
“I don’t think we had a choice,” Kevin Durant said. “I haven’t crawled into a cardboard bed since I’ve been doing all this. “
It turns out that village life doesn’t appeal to everyone.
(Main photos: Mike Egerton/PA Images Getty Images)