Athletes say they’ve been on the verge of tears because of the “inedible” Fyre Fest-like food at hotel quarantine facilities at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.
Russian athlete Valeria Vasnetsova, Polish speed-skater Natalia Maliszewska and U.S. bobsled medalist Elana Meyers Taylor all tested positive for COVID-19 after arriving in Beijing and had to isolate. There among reportedly hundreds of other athletes as well as Olympic Games organisers who have COVID and are in isolation, per USA Today.
Vasnetsova in a now-deleted Instagram post said she had been served the same meal for “breakfast, lunch and dinner for five days already”.
We can’t include the photo because Channel Seven has exclusive rights to anything from the event but you can take a look at it here. The meal in the picture consisted of a tray of dry penne pasta, nasty roasted potatoes, a sad-looking piece of white chicken, some sort of meat chops and an orange thick soup that barely passes as a bolognese sauce.
Ah yes, the three major food categories: carbs, sauce and meat.
The Olympics food court also appeared to be extremely dystopian. A video that circulated online showed plates of food carried down from the ceiling by robot claws and what looked like food cooked in a mechanic pot without any human chef on duty.
“I’m very pale and I have huge black circles around my eyes,” Vasnetsova said when in hotel quarantine at the Beijing Olympic Games.
“I want all this to end. I cry every day. I only sleep all day because I don’t even have the strength to get out of bed.”
“I only eat three handfuls of pasta a day because it’s just impossible to eat the rest of the food,” she added.
Maliszewska tested positive on January 30 and said in a translation via USA Today that she “didn’t believe in anything anymore” after the experience. Other athletes reported that they had little equipment or space in their rooms to train before the competition if they were allowed out of isolation.
— Natalia Maliszewska (@NMaliszewska) February 6, 2022
The International Olympic Committee’s sports director Kit McConnell told reporters on Monday that the committee had a “support network in place to deal with athletes’ concerns both individually and collectively”.
But he also blamed the one-star rated meals on the Beijing Olympic organising committee which had “responsibility for dialogue with the hotels” used for athletes to isolate.
Vice President of Beijing’s committee Shu’an Yang sat next to him in that meeting and said that it was “in a process of addressing these problems”.
The girls are fightiiiing.
Vasnetsova’s team spokesman Sergei Averyanov told the Associated Press that the Russian biathlete was later served a new meal which consisted of “salmon, cucumbers, sausages and yogurt”.
