Flipping through the channels on a lazy afternoon, NBC's Olympic coverage catches your eye. You're inspired, so you grab your curling broom. But wait, even a curler needs a hearty meal to fuel his sweeping. What do the Olympians eat?
As the 20th Winter Olympics begin, the cutting-edge science of sports nutrition will propel athletes to gold. While much has changed in the 3,000 years since the first Olympics in Athens, Greece, an Olympian's diet has always been the secret to success.
Imagine two football fields packed with food. This scene greets athletes walking into the Olympic Village in Torino this week. With a two-story, 80-yard-long cafeteria, Olympians can find almost anything to meet their strict competition diets.
The monster food court features Asian fusion, a pizzeria, salad, meat and pasta station, as well as loads of bread and fruit'all free. Figure skaters watching their figures can even pick up a double-quarter-pounder at McDonald's, the prime sponsor of the Village.
Ancient Olympians would have shunned such a variety, extolling the virtues of single-food diets. Many athletes at the first Olympics in 776 B.C. ate nothing but dried figs. Mmm.
Ancient Greek fad diets were way ahead of their time. Marathon runners in the first Olympics pioneered the Atkins' diet thousands of years before the Burger King bunless disaster. Aided by their upper-class wealth, these athletes ate nothing but pork and avoided bread.
Ancient Olympian wrestlers had mythic appetites. Milo of Croton, a six-time Olympic champion, was said to have eaten 20 pounds of meat and 20 pounds of bread at each meal. Yummy Buffet would be in trouble.
Other wrestlers made their training functional, wrestling bulls that they would later eat. It's hard to say which is more mythical'that one man could wrestle a quarter-ton bull or that one man could eat that same bull in one sitting. On the other hand, anyone who has finished a Monster Thickburger from Hardee's has likely taken down the better half of Bessie.
Luckily, such Homeric feats of consumption were soothed by advanced belching techniques, which were thought to aid not only in digestion but also in strength building. If only beer burps truly had such an effect, Madison would be filled with he-men.
Olympian eaters still exist. When the Olympics returned to Athens in 2004, power lifters downed more than 7,000 calories each day at the Olympic Village. These behemoths aren't invited to the Winter Games for fear they might eat the figure skaters, who average a mere 1,200 calories per day.
Alcohol's place in the Olympic diet hasn't changed much. Like today's athletes, ancient Olympians considered alcohol detrimental to performance. Ancient texts note it was easy to see if an opponent consumed an excess of wine'when competing naked the beer belly was hard to hide.
Badger fans will be happy to know alcohol dominated the ancient sports fan's diet. Greek fans flocked to the primitive sports bars to guzzle wine before events. Next fall, as you pass the three-story beer bongs on the way to Camp Randall, thank the ancient Greeks.
Nevertheless, the college diet has little in common with the strict regimens of both ancient and modern Olympians. Most of us identify more with U.S. skier Bode Miller, who admits he often spends early competition runs sobering up. Thus perhaps the most important thing to be learned from the ancient Greeks is the Olympian hangover remedy: sweat it out.
