How To Sleep Like An Olympic Athlete (Should) | Olympics

The almost superhuman feats of Olympic athletes are the result of years of meticulous training and preparation. But one aspect is often overlooked – how they sleep.

Few manage to get the kip they need

On the day of his flight to the summer Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021, Irish artistic gymnast Rhys McClenaghan woke up at 4.30 am to fit in a training session, hoping to tire himself out. In a bid to defeat jet lag, he planned to sleep for just the first half of the 16-hour flight, hoping his body clock would slot into the new time zone – eight hours ahead of Dublin – when he landed.

“My coach says he should be able to wake me up in the middle of the night and I should be able to do a routine straight away,” McClenaghan said in a video he posted on YouTube at the time. It seems being prepared to perform at any moment, even with an insufficient amount of sleep, is just part of the groundwork needed ahead of the historic sporting competition.

Most Olympic athletes undergo years, if not decades, of punishing exercise and conditioning regimes as they get ready to compete at the height of their sport.

Yet sleep is a crucial and often overlooked part of how someone performs in at the Games.