What Really Goes On Backstage At The Olympics – According To The Athletes Themselves

Throughout the Games, athletes live in the Olympic Village, which is generally closed off to outsiders. This obviously creates a specific sort of atmosphere, which one athlete has likened to a college campus. Tony Azevedo has represented America in water polo at five different Olympic Games, so he knows all about the ambience of the event. He told ESPN in 2012, “It’s like the first day of college... You’re nervous, super-excited.”

One of the perks of being an Olympic athlete is that you get a free pass to other events besides your own. Except, competitors are often so exhausted that they just watch them on TV like the rest of us. Marti Malloy, who took home bronze in judo at the 2012 Games, told website Mental Floss, “I remember sitting in a common room watching something on television... My teammate turned to me and said, ‘I guess we could have just gone to this.’”

The sleeping arrangements in the Olympic Village are sort of like a hostel, with athletes bunking in the same rooms. Unless, of course, they’re part of a couple. British cyclists Laura Trott and Jason Kenny were in a relationship when they were competing at the Rio Games in 2016. As Trott explained to Cosmopolitan magazine, “We’re in different apartments, but they’re opposite each other, so I just keep going in there!”

The Olympic Village is made up of high-rise buildings which contain the athletes’ apartments. These blocks all generally look the same as each other, except the competitors have a tradition of decorating their own places with their nation’s flag. As Trott explained to Cosmopolitan, the British building at Rio was adorned with “lions and flags all over the place.”

You might presume that getting to the Olympics is just a question of hard work and talent. Sadly, it’s not quite so simple. As American skeleton bobsled racer Kyle Tress explained to Mental Floss, it costs a lot of money to compete. Speaking of the costs of representing his country at the 2014 Winter Games, he said, “It’s astronomical... A competition sled alone costs well over $10,000, and you have to buy new runners at $1,000 each. Then there’s travel. Some of these places, like a ski resort in France, aren’t easy to get to.”

It’s not all intensity for Olympic athletes; there are opportunities for respite. There’s even a salon in the Village to attend, should they so wish. Here, they can get a new hairdo or have their nails done. It offers a moment of pampering in what must otherwise be an exhausting experience.

Even though the Olympic Village isn’t exactly the height of luxury, it’s still a weird and wonderful place for athletes. Carrie Sheinberg was an alpine skier during the Winter Games of 1994, and she remembers it fondly. She described the Village in Lillehammer, Norway, to ESPN as “a magical, fairytale place, like Alice in Wonderland, where everything is possible.”

If you’re an American competitor at the Olympic Games, there’s an additional incentive for winning besides glory. The U.S. government will apparently gift you a hefty $37,500 sum if you take home the gold. Given the costs of getting to the Games, though, maybe this isn’t as much as you’d like.

The Opening Ceremony of any Olympic Games is always a memorable show, but not every athlete takes it completely seriously. Some of them, in fact, skip it entirely. Their justification is pretty reasonable, though: they don’t want to be standing around for a whole day as it unfolds. They need to preserve their energy, after all.

During the Rio Games, any athletes that didn’t want to take part in the official opening ceremony had another option. Back at the Village, a ceremony was hosted exclusively for the competitors. There was even music and dancing, but according to Cosmopolitan the event didn’t last too long because someone complained about all the racket.

The Olympic Village can offer athletes some respite from the intensity of the Games. Here, they can unwind away from the press and even their own families. Generally speaking, even loved ones can’t get in here, though there are exceptions. Competitors with babies can bring them in, plus underage athletes obviously have guardians. In Japan this year, for instance, teenage British skateboarder Sky Brown was joined by her dad.

Some events finish up before others during the Olympics, which means early winners need to stay calm after their competitions have concluded. Everyone still competing needs to focus, so the people who are finished can’t go too wild. As Tress remarked to Mental Floss, “When people are finished competing, it turns into more of a party atmosphere... But you have to be respectful.”

As the Olympic Games near their end, though, more and more athletes are freed from their more restrictive routines. And that, naturally, means the atmosphere throughout the Village becomes a little more wild. As gold medal-winning soccer player Julie Foudy remarked to ESPN, the place “turns into a frat party.”

Naturally, coaching teams aren’t happy if their athletes start going too crazy at the Games. Some of them, in fact, even enforce some strict rules, such as curfews and drinking bans. The American swimming coaching staff even once reportedly banned visits to bedrooms occupied by the opposite sex in order to keep their athletes focused on the task at hand.

You’d expect Olympic athletes to have the healthiest possible diets, but some of them can’t get enough of McDonald’s. The fast-food giant always opens up a store in the Olympic Village, where athletes are allowed to eat for free. According to Mental Floss, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt has claimed that he ate about 1,000 McNuggets in ten days at the Beijing event in 2008.

Eyes from all over the world are on the Olympic Games, so brands want to make themselves as visible as possible. That’s why fashion labels give the sportspeople clothes for free. The athletes get so much, though, that they end up trading with each other. Malloy explained to Mental Floss, “You get duffel bags full of the stuff... You have to wear it all the time so there’s enough to wear for two weeks, and we wind up trading amongst ourselves.”

Given that the Olympics involve the greatest athletes on Earth, you might expect their accommodation for the event to be pretty luxurious. Well, it isn’t. The rooms in Rio, for instance, came with a long mirror and a beanbag and not a whole bunch else. Even the beds were uncomfortable, with the British cyclists reportedly resorting to replacing them with their own.

The Olympic Village is something of a small city in its own right, so it can take a long time to walk from one end to another. There’s an elegant solution for the athletes, though. To help them get from A to B, many people hop onto bikes and cycle around.

Speaking to Cosmopolitan, British cyclist Trott likened her Olympics experience to being on a reality show. In her words, it’s comparable to “being in the Big Brother house... It’s insane, every single person in there wants the same thing; there’s like thousands and thousands of people in there and you’re all striving for gold medals.”

Olympic athletes are naturally competitive by nature, all chasing glory. But that doesn’t mean they don’t lend each other some support. In the Olympic Village, there’s an area where they all go to watch the other events. Many athletes also use the hashtag #OneTeam as a way of expressing unity between all the competitors.

Given the numbers of competitors and spectators involved, cities hosting the Olympics are always busy; jams are inevitable. Athletes can’t exactly afford to be late to their competition, though, so they’re permitted to travel in highway lanes exclusively designated for them. As Rummel explained to Mental Floss, “There were dedicated traffic lanes, which made it much easier getting around.”

The Australian team had a pretty tough time at the Rio Games in 2016 when they fell victim to both bad luck and theft. They all had to exit their apartment block because of a fire, but when they went back inside they discovered that some of their possessions had gone missing. The head of Australia’s team, Kitty Chiller, spoke to the press afterwards and explained that computers and specially made shirts had been taken.

The Olympics offer participants a unique opportunity for athletes to mix with people from other cultures. Looking back on his experience of the 1976 Games in Montreal, American diver Greg Louganis remembered his bond with his Soviet counterparts. He told ESPN, “Once events were over, our entire diet was caviar, vodka and Russian champagne. It was crazy.”

A number of tickets are allocated to competitors’ loved ones, but a lot of trading goes on. As Team USA rower Henrik Rummel recalled to Mental Floss in 2016, “My dad is in charge of tickets this year... He’ll trade off days with other [athletes’] family members to fill the tickets we need.”

You’d presume that Olympic events would be the most tense and jittery moments of an athlete’s life, but Malloy suggested otherwise. Speaking to Mental Floss, she explained that the qualifiers could actually be way worse. She said, “There can be more nerves in a small tournament when you feel like you can’t lose... In the Olympics, it’s like, you lost, but you lost among the best people on the planet.”

There aren’t too many awkward silences at the Games, and for good reason. American soccer player Hope Solo explained to ESPN, “Unlike at a bar, it’s not awkward to strike up a conversation because you have something in common... It starts with, ‘What sport do you play?’ All of a sudden, you’re fist-bumping.”

As an Olympic athlete, you’re basically a celebrity – and that means you meet other celebs, too. Solo, for instance, has her own A-lister tale. She told ESPN, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we met a bunch of celebrities. Vince Vaughn partied with us. Steve Byrne, the comedian. And at some point we decided to take the party back to the village, so we started talking to the security guards, showed off our gold medals, got their attention and snuck our group through without credentials – which is absolutely unheard of.”

Hygiene was always a huge deal at the Olympic Games, even before this year. Long before the pandemic had altered our habits, athletes at the Games were meticulously washing their hands with sanitizer. And some were covering their faces with masks. Before 2020 that was quite an unusual thing to see, remember.

Olympic athletes put so much work into training that they often can’t hold down a proper job. This, in turn, means that they can find it difficult to receive dental care. But as Tress explained to Mental Floss, there’s a dentist in the Olympic Village that they can use for free. The skeleton bob racer said, “The U.S. Olympic Committee [itself] doesn’t provide dental for us. For a sport where we’re required to wear a mouth guard, that’s pretty crazy.”

Following the 2016 Games in Rio, an interesting statistic was noted. According to Us Weekly magazine, throughout the course of the competition, the dating app Tinder was used in the area at a rate of 129 percent greater than usual. And at the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, it was an incredible rise of 348 percent. The athletes, it seems, had more on their minds than their respective sports.

Gold medalist soccer player Julie Foudy was blunt in 2012 when she described the dining hall in the Olympic Village. She likens the place to a school cafeteria, but one where “everyone’s beautiful.” She told ESPN, “We’d graze over our food for hours watching all the eye candy, wondering why I got married.”

In the run-up to a big event, you might see some pretty strange behavior from the athletes. Not only do they need to prepare their bodies, but their minds need to be focused, too. In order to achieve this, various sports stars adopt differing methods. For instance, some might read, while others might repeat mottos to themselves.

The Norwegian women’s handball team didn’t have the ideal run-up to the Tokyo Games. Tired of what they viewed as a sexist rule, they refused to compete at the recent European Beach Handball Championships in Bulgaria in bikini bottoms. While they were actually fined for wearing “improper clothing”, they quickly received support from American singer Pink, who offered to pay the money on their behalf. She tweeted, “I’m very proud of the Norwegian female beach handball team for protesting the very sexist rules about their ‘uniform.’”

Given that the Olympic Village is built especially for the Games, it’s maybe unsurprising that it’s not always finished when the athletes arrive. Speaking about the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, Tress told Mental Floss, “Our apartment door had a 2.5-inch gap on the bottom.” And his friend, meanwhile, had a bathroom with a broken lock. As Tress tells it, “He had to punch his way out.”

This one isn’t surprising, but it’s such a big part of life at the Olympic Village that it can’t be ignored. The athletes obviously need to work out and prepare for their events, so where do they go? Well, there’s an extensive gym on site, where they can train and get ready for their big moment.

In addition to all the sports, the Olympics is also a vacation for the competitors. So, many of them get out there to meet the locals of the host city. American surfer Carissa Moore recently posted on Instagram, “The support and good spirit we have received from the people of Makinohara has been so heartwarming.” She added, “Both mornings the locals have come down to cheer us on and have been so kind to share their beach with us to train. The USA tribe is vibin’.”

According to a group of psychologists, bronze-winning medalists might actually be happier with their result than silver medalists. That’s because those in second place might torture themselves over how close they came to gold, whereas those in third place might be more at ease. Bronze medalist Rummel told Mental Floss, “I was a little disappointed as a first reaction, but then you realize it’s special and allow yourself to celebrate.”

When the Olympics ends, then comes the Closing Ceremony. We’ve all seen this, but what we may have missed is the state of some of the athletes there. Some of them show up to the event drunk, as soccer player Brandi Chastain told ESPN. She said, “This is our chance to let loose... Our hair is on fire, we’re leaving the next morning, and we’re going to enjoy our last 24 hours.”

As night falls on this final night of festivities at the Olympics, the best place to party is probably with the host country’s team. When the Games took place in Sydney, for example, the Australian baseball and soccer players took their duty seriously, throwing a huge party with a bonfire at its center. As footballer Alicia Ferguson joked to ESPN, “Who knew the village furniture could burn so well?”

Once that final party concludes, that’s the end of the Games for another four years. Well, for most people. But some athletes actually keep the party going on their plane journey back home. According to ESPN, when the Americans were flying home after the 2000 Sydney Games, the flight attendants delivered a warning to the other passengers. They said, “Ladies and gentlemen, anybody who wishes to sleep, trade seats with someone in the front of the plane. Everybody else to the back with the Olympians.”