Every four years, the best athletes in the world descend upon a single city to compete in the Summer Olympics. It’s an overwhelming display of competition, athleticism and national pride.
Those athletes — the ones who have spent their entire lives training for the chance to earn a gold medal — slept on cardboard beds at the 2024 Paris Olympics (and in games prior).
Team USA gymnast Simone Biles says that needs to change.
Biles, 27, spoke to Us Weekly exclusively at the Gold Over America Tour at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, which will host the 2028 Summer Olympics. This is the second rendition of the tour, which premiered in 2021 after the Tokyo Games. Biles, along with teammates Jordan Chiles, Trinity Rodman and more have embarked on a 30-city tour across the country in a “high-flying pop concert,” according to the event’s website. This year, members of the men’s US gymnastics team also joined the tour.
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“We’re elite athletes trying to compete on the biggest stage of our life, the most important meet of our life, and they’re like, ‘Hey, try doing it after you sleep on this cardboard bed,’” Biles told Us.
In 2024, the cardboard beds were part of Paris’ effort to make the Olympics the “greenest-ever Games,” according to event organizers, who said the beds would be 100 percent recycled after the Olympics. Fans and media also speculated that they were designed to discourage athletes from hooking up in the Olympic Village, which has become commonplace over the years.
“We’re the best athletes in the world, so I feel like for just one or two weeks we deserve the best of the best,” Biles, who has played coy about official plans to return for the 2028 Games, continued. “You know, we shouldn’t be stressing about sleeping on a cardboard bed.”
She’s not the only athlete to complain about the cardboard beds. Team Australia water poloist Matilda Kearns wrote under a TikTok video on July 21 that she “already had a massage to undo the damage” from the sleeping arrangements. The games did not begin until three days later.
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That’s not to say the Olympic Village lacked any redeeming qualities. Biles described the opportunity to meet competitors from all backgrounds as one of the highs of the experience.
“Meeting all the other athletes from around the world, no matter the background, language barrier. You’re coming together and supporting one another,” she said.
That sense of support, Biles said, relates to the one thing that TV and movies get wrong about the Olympics. She said women are too often portrayed as being pitted “against each other,” especially within their own teams.
“It is truly a sisterhood, and we’ve been training together, like me and Jordan have known each other since I was 14 and she was like 11,” Biles said. That’s not the case when we’re out there. It’s not catty. We’re not bratty towards one another. We truly want everybody to do their best.”
With reporting by Carly Konsker
