Ancient Greek athletes ate dried figs, moist cheese and wheat. The modern-day American who is the greatest shot putter in history sources his raw power from burritos and pizzas, measuring his success in calories as well as centimetres.
Ryan Crouser is the only three-time Olympic gold medal shot putter, with his win in Paris following triumphs in Rio and Tokyo. Overcoming recent injury problems, on Saturday his best effort at a rainy Stade de France was 22.90m.
While for many athletes the challenge would be maintaining a calorie-controlled diet despite the urge to eat more, Crouser, who is 6ft 7in (201cm) tall and weighs about 320lbs (145kg), has the opposite problem. “I don’t even like food any more,” the 31-year-old told The New York Times in 2019. “Each one of my meals is half of what a normal person eats in a day. And I do that five times. If I ever feel hungry during the day that means I’m not doing my job. So I eat all the time. Sometimes before another meal I’ll stare at it for a while, like, ‘This again.’”
Crouser told CNBC he spends $1,000 a month on food in order to maintain his intake at 5,000 calories a day (the average recommended amount for a man his age is around 2,500). He has said that he eats nine eggs in the form of two breakfast burritos in the mornings, with sausage or bacon, cheese, sour cream and salsa on flour tortillas. A typical lunch might be 12 ounces of rice and a pound of lean ground beef with barbecue sauce, and then he often orders in “a family of three’s dinner”, perhaps a large meat pizza washed down with a pint of milk, concluding with “another snack before I go to bed”. He once gained five pounds after a single meal of rice, chicken, mac and cheese and dessert.
“I’m always trying to keep my body weight up. I was the taller, skinnier kid growing up, and it’s always been a battle for me to gain weight,” Crouser told GQ in 2021. “Food is almost a part of training for me. I’m eating on a set schedule that makes sure I never get hungry.” In the offseason, he added, he aims for 6,000 calories a day as he is “doing higher reps and burning more calories while trying to gain more muscle. I try to never go more than three hours without eating. I’m always eating something.”
At international competitions he compensates for smaller portion sizes by downing shakes or going out for extra meals. “I did lose a little weight in Rio. Most countries tend to be way on the lighter side in terms of calories than normal American cuisine,” he told GQ.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Crouser grew up in nearby Boring and hails from a family of extraordinary hurlers. His father, Mitch, was an alternate on the US discus team for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, his uncle, Brian, competed in the javelin in the 1988 and 1992 Games; another uncle, Dean, was a college shot put and discus champion and a cousin, Sam, took part in the javelin in Rio in 2016. Crouser became fascinated in throwing mechanics and obsessively studied the style of Ulf Timmermann, the East German glide technique expert who won the 1988 gold in Seoul.
Crouser studied economics and finance at the University of Texas, training full-time after finishing his master’s in 2016. He was offered a tryout by the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts in 2016 but chose to stick with the shot put and also won gold at the world championships in 2022 and 2023.
Holder of the indoor and outdoor world records since 2021, the year he shattered a 31-year-old outdoor record held by another American, Randy Barnes, Crouser improved his outdoor mark to 23.56m in 2023 in a discipline that American men have historically dominated.
Crouser’s friend and fellow Team USA member, Joe Kovacs, who won silver in Paris for the third successive Olympics, is 6ft tall and weighs about 300lbs. He eats a dozen eggs for breakfast.
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They are far from the only Olympians to observe diets that for ordinary mortals would be more likely to end in a referral to a gastroenterologist than a place on the podium. Swimmers are proof that champions have insatiable hunger, literally as well as metaphorically. The former American Olympic champion Ryan Lochte admitted to eating pizza and chicken wings every Friday. His training regime was so intense that he says he munched up to 8,000 calories a day, chewing so much that he developed jaw pain.
The most decorated Olympian of them all, Michael Phelps, consumed as many as 10,000 calories a day and told NBC he ate “pretty much whatever I feel like”. That included this typical order from his favourite breakfast cafe in Baltimore: “Start with three sandwiches of fried eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, fried onions and mayonnaise; add one omelette, a bowl of grits and three slices of french toast with powdered sugar; then wash down with three chocolate chip pancakes.”
Suspicious of the food in China during the Beijing Olympics, Usain Bolt wrote in his autobiography The Fastest Man Alive that he won gold in the 100m and 200m while subsisting on a daily diet of a hundred chicken McNuggets. “I’d tried a local Chinese meal, which wasn’t like the ones we eat in the West, and my body didn’t react well,” he wrote. “So, knowing I could rely on nuggets, I made up my mind that was all I would eat. And eat them I did, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, washed down with bottled water.”