Paris Olympics 2024: The cardboard beds aren’t ‘anti-sex’ – but are they comfy?

A cardboard bed in an athlete's room at the Olympic Village in Paris. Photo / VCG via Getty Images

The cardboard beds in the Paris Olympic Village are touted as both sustainable and recyclable. But do athletes like them?

When athletes arrived at the Paris Olympic Village, a few immediately noted a decor choice in their otherwise sparse rooms: a cardboard bed frame.

“There is always a lot of talk about the beds in the Olympic Village, so here is what they look like!” British springboard diver Tom Daley wrote on Instagram, alongside a video displaying the digs. The bed, composed of cardboard boxes, resembles someone’s porch after a late night of online shopping.

While a cardboard bed doesn’t sound particularly comfortable, only the bed frame is made out of the material. A regular mattress and a mattress topper rest atop the cardboard foundation, with a Paris 2024 Olympic duvet finishing the look. So it’s not like the athletes are actually sleeping directly on heavy paper.

“I’ve had a [lot] of people asking me if the beds are really cardboard, and the answer is yes and no,” Evy Leibfarth, a Team USA canoeist, said on TikTok. “They’re definitely mostly cardboard, but we’re, like, sleeping on a mattress. We’re not sleeping on, like, something super hard.”

This isn’t the first Olympics with cardboard bed frames – the furniture made its debut in Tokyo in 2021, where it drew similar attention from athletes and onlookers.

That’s also when the beds got the infamous - and inaccurate - reputation of being “anti-sex”. Rumours circulated that the beds were constructed with cardboard to prevent athletes from getting intimate with one another and potentially spreading Covid-19.

But the beds can withstand vigorous activity, as multiple athletes have demonstrated on social media by jumping, somersaulting and otherwise showing their physical prowess atop the cardboard frames.

For the second Olympics in a row, Irish gymnast Rhys McClenaghan posted a video of himself performing a “rigorous” test of the beds’ strength, and once again the cardboard was sturdy enough to pass. He called the “anti-sex” nickname “fake, fake news!”

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The cardboard bed frames were designed with sustainability, rather than chastity, in mind.

“The organising committee was thinking about recyclable items, and the bed was one of the ideas,” Takashi Kitajima, the general manager of the Tokyo Athletes Village, told the Associated Press in 2020.

The beds can hold 200kg of weight, per Kitajima. After the games, the frames could be recycled into paper products.

The organisers of the Paris Olympics, who have promised to keep emissions from the event historically low, adopted the bed frame design.

“These are the famous Tokyo 2020 beds that made it to Paris 2024,” a TikTok posted by the official Olympics account this month states. “These sustainable beds are 100% made in France and will be fully recycled in France after the Games.”

And athletes who want to make the beds better suit their sleeping preferences have some options, including adjusting the firmness and extending the length.

United States swimmer Katie Ledecky is satisfied with the beds: “I’ve slept well the last two nights, so I have no complaints”.

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But Angelica Delgado, a US judo athlete, had a less ringing endorsement: “The cardboard beds are a bit stiff, but it’s okay”.

Some athletes opted to modify the beds. The US women’s water polo team said they received new mattress toppers, as did members of the US women’s gymnastics team.

“We’re getting mattress tops today, hallelujah, so we’ll sleep a little better,” said Cecile Landi, coach of gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, on Thursday. “It’s a little hard, not going to lie.”