While most athletes are having to make do with cardboard beds and non air conditioned rooms within the Paris Olympic Village, dozens of lucky competitors are having fun with life on a luxury cruise ship, 15,000km (9,300 miles) away .
Plenty of the surfers participating on this 12 months’s Games are staying on the Aranui 5 cruise ship off the coast of the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, 45 minutes from this 12 months’s browsing venue in Teahupo’o.
Dubbed the “first-ever floating Olympic village”, the dual-purpose passenger and freighter ship can accommodate about 230 passengers in over 100 cabins.
It also incorporates a Sky bar, dancing room, library, fitness room and a spa.
Many athletes have taken to social media to indicate off life contained in the floating village, which has been described as a “party boat” and “higher than Paris.”
Sharing an inside look into the ship, Japanese surfer Kanoa Igarashi revealed athletes have access to a 24-hour dining hall, gift shop, tattoo parlor, private bedrooms, and an activity area with a foosball and ping pong table.
“I believe our athlete village in Tahiti is healthier than the actual one in Paris,” Igarashi shared within the video.
German surfer Tim Elter has also shown off the amenities, sharing a video of the breathtaking views from his cabin, where there will not be a single cardboard bed in sight.
“We actually do have real aluminium bed frames, as you may see there. They’re solid and stable,” he said as he tapped the bed frame.
“We got it higher than the blokes in Paris.”
Elter and Camilla Kemps have clearly been having fun with life at sea, sharing clips of themselves dancing to music on their balconies.
“Excitement through the roof,” Elter captioned one video of the pair on board the “party boat”.
Latest Zealand surfer Saffi Vette also joined in on the fun, sharing a clip of herself hanging out with the German competitors as they blasted tunes.
“Vibes are high here on our floating Olympic Village,” she captioned the video.
“When the Germans are staying above you within the Olympic village … They attached a speaker to a leg rope and swung it over your balconies,” she added within the clip.
The scenes are starkly different from those coming out of the Olympic Village in Paris, where athletes have complained in regards to the “anti-sex” cardboard beds, vegan food options and a transport system which has left plenty stranded while trying to achieve training venues and official Games locations.
Addressing the sleeping arrangements on TikTok, Aussie water polo star Tilly Kearns said the bed was “rock solid” while a teammate said “my back is about to fall off”.
US tennis champion Coco Gauff also shared a chaotic glimpse contained in the Team USA living arrangements contained in the village, revealing there are “10 girls, two bathrooms” in a video on TikTok.
More recently, Aussie swimming champ Ariarne Titmus admitted the “living within the Olympic Village makes it hard to perform.”
“It’s definitely not made for top performance, so it’s about who can really keep it together within the mind,” she said in a post race interview.
Outside of the sleeping arrangements, the food options – which have been widely reported to be dominated by a vegan weight loss program – has also been criticised.
Chatting with The Times, British Olympic Association’s chief executive, described the food as “not adequate”, sharing team GB have been forced to fly in their very own chef to assist prepare meals.
“There will not be enough of certain foods: eggs, chicken, certain carbohydrates, after which there may be the standard of the food, with raw meat being served to athletes. They’ve to enhance it over the subsequent couple of days dramatically.”
“Our athletes have decided they’d fairly go and eat in our performance lodge in Clichy, so we’re having to get one other chef to come back over because the demand is way exceeding what we thought it might be.”
Aussie swimming great James Magnussen weighed in on complaints coming out of the village in a bit for News Corp newspapers.
“From our sample size up to now, this Olympics is showing that it could be one in every of the hardest environments we’ve seen to supply world record swims,” Magnussen wrote.
“The shortage of world records boils all the way down to this whole eco-friendly, carbon footprint, vegan-first mentality fairly than high performance.
“That they had a charter that said 60 per cent of food within the village needed to be vegan-friendly and the day before the opening ceremony they ran out of meat and dairy options within the village because they hadn’t anticipated so many athletes can be selecting the meat and dairy options over the vegan-friendly ones.”
“The caterer needed to rejig their numbers and produce in additional of those products because surprise, surprise – world class athletes don’t have vegan diets.”
“It seemed Paris desired to be eco first, performance second on the Games. I don’t know if that’s a political stance, or if it’s a value stance, but I believe in the longer term we’d like to look to other options since the Olympics is the top sporting event on the planet.”
