ESO YEAR 3 - 13th-17th February

DUE FRIDAY, 17TH FEBRUARY 2017

READING - GOING FOR GOLD

CHAPTER 6 – LIFE IN AN OLYMPIC VILLAGE

National Olympic Committees spend years planning and building their Olympic villages. With thousands of athletes, coaches and members of the media from around the world coming to stay for weeks, the Olympic village must be able to keep them all happy. This is a complicated thing!

In 2008, athletes entertained themselves with many different activities in the Beijing Olympic Village. There were pool tables, tennis and basketball courts, a swimming pool and a leisure centre. There was also a free medical clinic with hundreds of doctors. Some athletes even studied the Chinese language while taying in the village!

Many athletes were nervous about coming to China because the air and water quality were very bad. The Chinese government tried to make athletes comfortable, so before the Beijing Olympics, they spent billions of dollars cleaning the air of Beijing. They reduced the number of cars in Beijing by more than a million every day. At the Olympics vilage, many of the 9,000 rooms used solar power. The committee also treated the water in the village, so that athletes were able to drink water directly from the tap, something rare in China. The athletes were pleasantly surprised to find that the air quality in Beijing was very good.

Beijing Olympic Village

Food and Diets

Serving food to 16,000 athletes and officials every day – at the Beijing Olympic village – is very difficult. Dining must satisfy many different tastes, as well as health and religiou requirements. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Village, the main dining hall was 200 metres long – that's the length of two football fields! Around 3,500 people could eat there at once.

In Beijing, athletes could choose between Chinese food, Italian – pizza, pasta – and American-style cuisine. The most popular food was Beijing duck, a meal of sliced, fresh-cooked duck served with spring onions and sweet bean sauce on delicate pancakes. Halal food for Muslims and kosher food for Jewish athletes was also available at the Games.

The dining hall was free to competitors and open 24 hoours a day. Competitors in Beijing ate 100,000 kilograms of food every day! Daily waste from the dining hall was about 50,000 kilograms.

Atlanta Olympic Village

Art and Entertainment

Art events in the ancient Olympics also inspired Pierre de Coubertin and he wanted to include them in the modern Olympics. In April 1906, he invited artists to choreograph dances, write poetry, compose music, paint and sculpt for the Olympic Games. Since then, art and cultured have played an important part in the Games, especially at the opening and closing ceremonies.

At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah (USA), the organising committee tried to follow the Olympic Charter and “promote harmonious relation, mutual understanding and friendship” between all participants. It asked some of the USA's best dance choreographers to create new dances with imaginative acrobatic shows. Fabulous works of art were also part of he Olympic Arts Festival in Salt Lake City, incuding several magnificent glass sculptures by sculptor Dale Chihuly.

Olympic Fire, a sculpture by Dale Chihuly in Salt Lake City