Taking thousands of people in their physical prime from across the world and dropping them in the most romantic city in the world is a recipe for bedroom shenanigans, and flimsy cardboard beds probably won’t be much of a deterrent for Canadian athletes competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Olympians at this year’s games are once again sleeping (and also not sleeping) on eco-friendly cardboard beds that were first introduced for the Tokyo games three years earlier, where they quickly earned a misleading reputation as “anti-sex beds.”
While this was certainly not the intent of these designs (any doubts of durability were quickly debunked by athletes), the reputation persists for Paris 2024, leading many athletes to do their own testing.
Shalaya Valenzuela of Canada’s Women’s Sevens rugby team posted on TikTok over the weekend, helping to disprove the myth of these supposedly sex-proof beds by showing just how much of a beating they can really take.
if the entire canadian women’s rugby 7s team comes down with upper body injuries i think i know why pic.twitter.com/7VfGkvJzwO
— em (@canxawfc) July 29, 2024
In a test that pushed the cardboard beds to their limits, Canadian rugby sevens players used a range of body slams, tackles and other physically punishing moves to show the surprising durability of these beds.
The video has garnered over 350,000 likes and more than 1,500 comments as of Tuesday morning.
A few commenters expressed concern that players may be risking injury with these kinds of social media stunts, but the weekend bed-testing video clearly had little impact on players’ conditioning, as the team pulled off an epic comeback win on Tuesday to advance to the gold medal round.
So, barring some really wild antics, the Olympic Village in Paris likely won’t be calling for too many replacement beds this year.