Turin, Italy – I stood in front of the entrance to the Olympic Village’s dining hall, a fortress with the kind of security normally equated with a Swiss bank. As the guards eyed me as if I planned to slip ghastly Ragu sauce on their rigatoni, I saw an athletes parade worthy of the Opening Ceremony file by.
Mongolians and their leathered faces. Scruffy Canadians. Algerians shivering from the 35-degree weather outside. Gorgeous Russian women. (Warning to Italy and Sweden: Russian women are catching up to you as the most beautiful in the world.)
I wondered how they keep all these people’s stomachs happy. Can you feed a Finn the same way you feed a South Korean? Can an Uzbek figure skater learn to like pasta carbonara? Would mistaking god-awful borscht for tomato soup knock an American bobsledder out of the Olympics, not to mention life?
This was a different world from where I had come. I had made the long walk along the narrow bridge spanning the railroad yards that, somehow symbolically, separated the Olympic Village from the Main Media Center. While the Olympic Village is filled with many of the 2,500 athletes whose diets are crafted like legal documents by trained nutritionists, the Main Media Center is filled with 10,000 journalists who will eat anything not moving off their plate.
I saw one grizzled American reporter grouse in the Media Center, “I can’t find one decent hamburger in here!” When I saw his eyes light up after he ran into the McDonald’s that has disgraced one of the world’s great food nations, I went for a walk.
The Olympic Village is more city than village. Passing down a spiral stairwell, I saw a massage center, a grocery store, a concert stage. Two Russian blonds sat in a pseudo Internet café gossiping over an e-mail. I heard the soft melody of a saxophone as I made my way toward the dining hall.
The Olympic Village is brand, spankin’ new and appears erected with everything an athlete would desire. The Media Center, meanwhile, is built in the old Fiat factory. Go figure.
If you think feeding an army is hard, feeding Olympic athletes should be harder. Considering the particulars of their diet, their cultural differences and time schedules, it’s a culinary jigsaw puzzle.
I remember covering ski jumping at the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002. Ski jumpers need builds like birds, which is why a 17-year-old American jumper named Clint Jones told me he hadn’t had a piece of candy in three years. I interviewed figure skater Michelle Kwan last year in Atlanta while she munched on asparagus spears.
American bobsledder Todd Hays started one press conference in Salt Lake by dumping a pile of energy bars on the podium before launching into a tirade about the available free food that could possibly get them banned for illegal substances.
The numbers involved in keeping all these people happy are mind-boggling. According to the Torino Organizing Committee (TOROC), 2,000 workers will prepare 154,000 pounds of food and nearly 90,000 quarts of drinks. Every day. Workers will lay down 400,000 tableware sets and wash them with more than 100 dishwashers.
This isn’t mass production, either. Item menus include curry chicken and roast marinated in Barolo wine, Thai sticky rice and kimchi, the traditional Korean pickled vegetable. Each dish is accompanied with a nutritional chart and a list of allergens if applicable. It’s open 24 hours a day.
The person in charge of feeding the masses is food and beverage manager Lanisha Davish, a 30-year-old from Quakertown, Pa., who moved to Italy from London three years ago as a master of big events. Sitting in the workforce’s dining area, she said, surprisingly, the athletes are easy to please.
“They’re much more international than I thought,” she said. “We have a pizzeria, calzone, typical Italian products. But we also have Asian fusion with Chinese and Japanese. Asian fusion is one of our busiest lines.”
She hasn’t had requests as odd as they have in the Summer Olympics. In 1996, Atlanta’s organizing committee brought in huge vats of white rice for the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans. Oops! Wrong kind of white rice, the Asians said. They all left the village to eat.
Quality isn’t a problem here. Davish has strict national standards to meet before serving a single pasta shell. After all, this is Italy. She couldn’t use certain food suppliers because they didn’t meet the high standards of the national certification board.
Cold food can’t be served in the open without being in refrigerated containers.
“This isn’t like the States,” she said. “The standards are very high.”
McDonald’s notwithstanding.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road. He can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
