British athletes are reportedly staging a boycott of the Olympic village’s food in Paris. Team GB members are said to be refusing to eat in a number of restaurants because of supply shortages and being served uncooked meat.
The food provisions have previously been hailed by organisers, who had vowed to provide quality food for competitors, supplied by Michelin star chefs.
But instead chaos has reigned, with athletes subjected to lengthy queues and ‘raw’ chicken.
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And Team GB bosses are now set to fly in extra chefs from the UK to cook for the stars at their performance centre. Andy Anson, the British Olympic Association’s chief executive, told the Times: “At the beginning of every Games there are usually two or three issues and the transportation is always one,” he said.
“But the big one this time is the food in the village, which is not adequate. There are not enough of certain foods: eggs, chicken, certain carbohydrates, and then there is the quality of the food, with raw meat being served to athletes. They have got to improve it over the next couple of days dramatically.”
And Anson also explained how the discontent had forced team bosses to take action, with some stars even making their own packed lunches. “Our athletes have decided they would rather go and eat in our performance lodge in Clichy, so we are having to get another chef to come over as the demand is far exceeding what we thought it would be,” he said.
“The athletes are not going there just to eat their lunch, they are packing meals for their dinner as they don’t want to go into the athlete restaurant to eat. So we are trying to make sure our athletes have an advantage by having more food. It is the biggest issue at the moment.”
Accomodation is spread across the suburbs of Saint-Denis, Saint Ouen and L’Ile-Saint-Denis. Around 4,250 athletes are due to be housed during the Olympics, and 8,000 during the Paralympics.
Olympic chiefs have previously boasted that around 40,000 meals would be prepared every day in the village. The largest restaurant venue, however, was said to have only 3,300 seats.
A spokesman for Sodexo Live, the company in charge of catering, told L’Equipe the complaints were being taken “very seriously.” They said the complany was “working to increase our supplies to the restaurants in the athletes’ village.”
Team GB has 327 athletes set to compete in Paris. And the fallout comes on the eve that the majority of them were due to participate in the opening ceremony.
