Cardboard beds, norovirus, stinking wheely bins… summer’s heat brings agitated nights
It’s late at night on the hottest week of the year and the air is made of meat. I am lying in the dark thinking about the Olympians’ cardboard beds. A runner posted pictures of the beds – long boxes, creatively stacked – before they were installed at Tokyo Olympic Village, explaining they’d been designed to withstand the weight of a single person in order to avoid intimacy between those competing. Another athlete called them “anti-sex beds”. If I were an Olympian, which I’m currently not, I would take this as a challenge.
Wouldn’t there be some glory in travelling to Tokyo after all this, these years of dampened fright, and losing immediately? And then, enjoying the best holiday of your life, eating all the food you’d denied yourself over months of training, exploring a new country, and finding new and yogic ways to sleep with the fittest people in the world on beds that collapse when wet? Yes.