Ancient Greek athletes at dried figs, moist cheese and wheat. The modern American who is the greatest shot putter in history draws his raw strength from burritos and pizza, and measures his success in calories and inches.
Ryan Crouser is the only three-time Olympic gold medalist shot putter, with his victory in Paris following triumphs in Rio and Tokyo. After overcoming recent injury problems, his best performance on Saturday at a rainy Stade de France was 22.90m.
While for many athletes the challenge would be to maintain a calorie-controlled diet despite the urge to eat more, Crouser, who is 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighs about 300 pounds, has the opposite problem. “I don’t even like food anymore,” says the 31-year-old told The New York Times in 2019. “Every meal I eat is half of what a normal person eats in a day. And I do that five times. If I feel hungry during the day, that means I’m not doing my work. So I eat all the time. Sometimes before another meal, I stare at it for a while, like, ‘This is it again.’”
Crosser told CNBC he spends $1,000 a month on food to keep his calorie intake to 5,000 a day (the average recommended amount for a man his age is about 2,500). He has said that in the morning he eats nine eggs in the form of two breakfast burritos, with sausage or bacon, cheese, sour cream and salsa on flour tortillas. A typical lunch might consist of 12 ounces of rice and a pound of lean ground beef with barbecue sauce, and then he often orders “a family of three” for dinner, perhaps a large meat pizza washed down with a pint of milk, and finishes with “one more snack before I go to bed.” He once gained five pounds after a single meal of rice, chicken, macaroni and cheese and dessert.
“I always try to maintain my body weight. I was the taller, thinner kid growing up, and it’s always been a struggle for me to gain weight,” Crouser told GQ in 2021. “Eating is almost part of training for me. I eat on a schedule, so I never get hungry.” In the off-season, he added, he aims for 6,000 calories a day because he’s “doing more reps and burning more calories while trying to build more muscle. I try not to go more than three hours without eating. I always eat something.”
At international competitions, he compensates for the smaller portions by drinking shakes or eating out for extra meals. “I did lose some weight in Rio. Most countries are much lighter in calories than regular American cuisine,” he told GQ.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in nearby Boring, Crouser comes from a family of extraordinary hurlers. His father, Mitch, was a reserve on the U.S. discus team for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles; his uncle, Brian, threw the javelin in the 1988 and 1992 Games; another uncle, Dean, was a collegiate shot put and discus champion; and a cousin, Sam, threw the javelin in Rio in 2016. Crouser became fascinated with the mechanics of throwing and obsessively studied the style of Ulf Timmermann, the East German gliding expert who won gold in Seoul in 1988.
Crouser studied economics and finance at the University of Texas and trained full-time after earning his master’s degree in 2016. He was offered a tryout by the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts in 2016, but opted to pursue shot put and also won gold at the 2022 and 2023 world championships.
Crouser has held the indoor and outdoor world records since 2021, when he broke a 31-year-old outdoor record held by fellow American Randy Barnes. In 2023, he improved his outdoor record to 23.56 meters in a discipline historically dominated by American men.
Crouser’s friend and fellow Team USA member, Joe Kovacs, who won silver in Paris for the third consecutive Olympics, is 6ft tall and weighs about 300lbs. He eats a dozen eggs for breakfast.
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They are far from the only Olympians who follow diets that would, for mere mortals, result in a referral to a gastroenterologist rather than a podium finish. Swimmers are proof that champions have insatiable hungers, both literally and figuratively. Former U.S. Olympic champion Ryan Lochte allowed to eating pizza and chicken wings every Friday. His training regimen was so intense that he said he ate up to 8,000 calories a day, and chewed so much that he jaw pain.
The most decorated Olympian of them all, Michael Phelps, burned as much as 10,000 calories a day and told NBC that he ate “just about anything I wanted.” That included this typical order from his favorite Baltimore breakfast spot: “Start with three sandwiches with fried eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, fried onions and mayonnaise; add an omelet, a bowl of semolina porridge and three slices of French toast with powdered sugar; wash it down with three chocolate chip pancakes.”
Usain Bolt distrusts Chinese food during Beijing Olympics wrote in his autobiography The Fastest Man Alive that he won gold in the 100m and 200m while living on a daily diet of 100 chicken McNuggets. “I had tried a local Chinese meal, which was nothing like the food we eat in the West, and my body didn’t respond well to it,” he wrote. “So, knowing I could rely on nuggets, I decided that that was the only thing I would eat. And they did, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, washed down with bottled water.”