Getty Image / PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/POOL/AFP
The Paris Olympics are just 73 days away and getting closer by the minute and organizers just debuted the tiny new beds made out of cardboard for athletes to sleep in under the guise of them being environmentally friendly when everyone with working eyes can recognize they are to prevent athletes from sharing beds.
This year in the Olympic Village things will be slightly different from recent Olympic Games, or rather they’ll be more similar to the Olympics pre-2020, as the ‘Intimacy Ban‘ has officially been lifted on athletes and organizers will be handing out 300,000 free condoms to athletes in Paris.
These tiny beds… They’re so small. And they’re similar to the ones given to athletes at the rescheduled 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo but with some new threads on them. The New York Post is calling them ‘anti-sex beds’ and say they are aimed at deterring athletes from sharing beds with each other because (1) they are very small and (2) they beds are made out of cardboard.
Getty Image / PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/POOL/AFP
Do the people planning the Paris Olympics know there are sports other than Marathon and Gymnastics? How on earth is an athlete of any appreciable size supposed to fit into that tiny little cardboard bed?
Sure, many of the athletes who play professional sports year-round will be staying in hotels but over 14,000 athletes coming from all across the globe are expected to stay in the Paris Olympic Village during the games. Those beds are just a hair larger than the chair that folds into a bed in maternity wards that dads are forced to sleep on after their baby is born.
Sumo is a sport in the Olympic Games. Can you even fathom a sumo wrestler trying to get a good night’s sleep in that cardboard bed that looks like it was built for a toddler? Interestingly, AI will be used by planners to optimize each bed/mattress to the athlete. So gymnasts weighing 90 pounds won’t actually be sleeping on the same mattress used for a 300-pound sumo wrestler. But again, this all seems like a clever way to deflect from them just trying to keep athletes from sharing sheets.
Why these beds for Olympic athletes in Paris?
According to Inside the Games, the underlying reason for planners using these beds are the same reasons they opted to use them in Tokyo. Publicly, they state the cardboard beds are “an attempt to be environmentally sustainable.”
The message is these wee little beds are part of the Paris initiative to reduce the overall carbon emissions that will come out of the Olympic Games.
Straight up, if I’m an athlete in the Olympics I offer to take a boat to Europe instead of flying in exchange for a normal-sized bed. I know Europe prefers smaller beds overall and finding a proper ‘king sized bed’ in Europe is a laughable task because they just push together two twins to placate us Americans and don’t even manufacture or import mattresses large enough for our American dogs to sleep on, but c’mon.
They should just be admitting the underlying reason, which the media has done a good job at discussing, is to prevent professional athletes from sharing beds.