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 ton 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.” Rumors circulated that the beds were constructed with cardboard to prevent athletes from getting intimate with one another and potentially spreading covid.
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!”
The cardboard bed frames were designed with sustainability, rather than chastity, in mind. “The organizing 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 200 kilograms of weight, per Kitajima, which is about 440 pounds. After the games, the frames could be recycled into paper products.
The organizers 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 earlier this month states. “These sustainable beds are 100 percent 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.
U.S. swimmer Katie Ledecky is satisfied with the beds: “I’ve slept well the last two nights, so I have no complaints.”
But Angelica Delgado, a U.S. judo athlete, had a less ringing endorsement: “The cardboard beds are a bit stiff, but it’s okay.”
Adam Kilgore and Dave Sheinin in Paris contributed to this report.
