Australian athletes have come under fire for bringing their favourite tailormade stimulant into the Olympic village.
While the Aussie Olympic team have enjoyed unprecedented success at the Paris 2024 games — with friend of the brand Jack Robinson bringing home a shiny silver and plenty of time left for the team to bag a few more — they may have managed to attract some less glamorous attention from their fellow athletes for antics in the Olympic village…
Aussies have long been recognized as unparalleled snobs when it comes to their favourite stimulant — that is, perfectly brewed coffee and the accompanying caffeine kick — but it turns out that they’ve been garnering some heavy side-eyes from competing teams for bringing no less than three baristas along with them…
The Coffee Olympics
It was actually the Italians who — renowned for their world-leading coffee — first earned some flack for bringing their own, handpicked espresso machines with them to the games, which some took to be a terribly snobbish move that was an underhand swipe at the quality of coffee not just in pairs but France write large, stoking those ever-present, ever-petty Western European tensions…
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In fairness to the Italians, the coffee in France is… not great. This comes as a surprise to most people, given their reputation for good cooking, immaculate wines, world-beating cheeses and what one journalist has called “the most sophisticated cafe culture on earth“. Precisely why the French seem to struggle with their coffee is a conversation for another day, but this writer can attest to the just-okay rep their java gets.
However, while the Italians may be coffee snobs, no one does it better than the Aussies. As a Brit who recently moved to Australia — and, in doing so, fled one of the most notoriously lacking coffee nations on earth — I can agree that while Aussies are, without a doubt, the most pretentious population going when it comes to coffee, they do have every right to be; theirs is the best brew going, without a doubt.
And it’s precisely this high benchmark that the Australians have set for themselves that led to their bringing three fully-trained baristas with them to the games, much to the pearl-clutching shock of many other competing teams. When you do a little digging, however, it makes total sense…
Caffeine And Athletic Performance
Not only is recreating the home conditions of your Olympic athletes a closely a possible — at least, as closely as the world of cardboard single-beds will ever allow you to get — a massive boon, helping competitors more seamlessly transition into training and competition in foreign lands, but the science says that better coffee leads to better performance.
The gurus at Healthline summarise:
“Studies have shown that caffeine can benefit endurance performance, high intensity exercise, and power sports. However, it seems to benefit trained athletes the most.”
So, while it might be easy for other nations to sneer at the Aussies as they stroll about the park with their perfectly-foamed flat whites, there may be more to this than snobbery… and I’m inclined to say their medal count can testify to this.
