It's time for Olympics Sports Woo bingo!

As we again get our quadrennial dose of the latest fads in sports quackery

I don’t like to pick on Michael Phelps, because he stepped up big in his very public support of Simone Biles and mental health (even before he became a paid spokesperson for one online mental health provider). But he also contributed to the erosion of public science literacy with his very public embrace of sports woo, like cupping.

Wouldn’t you think that Olympic athletes would have the very best trainers and medical people, who would be up on all the latest science and would reject woo woo? Yeah, unfortunately, humans don’t work that way. The majority of people, even including sports trainers at the highest level, buy into all kinds of popular fashionable trends — especially when there’s money on the table from marketers who sell the crap.

Here now is my bingo card for the sports woo you’re certain to see at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Mark your card each time you see one, or make it a drinking game and take a shot:

• Kinesiotape: This first appeared 4 or 5 Olympics ago on the beach volleyball court when KT Tape, the original manufacture of brightly colored elastic tape strips, paid athletes to plaster it to their bodies in interesting patterns. The claims were vague, but trials have found no value in using it. The exception is if you use it in the same way real athletic taping is used to support a weak or injured joint, in which case it is only marginally less effective because it’s so stretchy and can’t provide the same kind of support.

• Cupping: The famous round hickey bruises often seen all over athletes’ skin from little suction cups. Originally this was claimed to have something to do with qi but when they became bigger and bigger business, marketers decided to sound more sciencey and rebranded it “myofacial decompression” or some variation. Even the Wikipedia page on it savages the practice pretty thoroughly. Don’t do it.

• Cryotherapy: You will almost certainly see athletes climbing into cryotherapy chambers to chill their bodies to well below -100ºC for a few minutes. This pseudoscience builds on the fact that icing injured tissue does effectively reduce pain and inflammation. But it doesn’t work in a cryotherapy chamber; air is among the poorest conductors of heat. Athletes get far better results by simply placing an ice pack directly on the injured area.

• Jewelry/stickers/trinkets/wearables: You’ll see all manner of trinkets and jewelry and wristbands and rings, and stickers on the skin, all pretending to be based upon the wonders of some Roganesque “bro science”. There are so many of these I won’t even pretend to claim this list is comprehensive, but they’ll claim to provide benefits such as:

  • Block harmless EMF from not damaging your tissues

  • Create EMF to mimic that magical radiation from Mother Nature

  • Force nasal breathing at night, because nose air is more magical than mouth air

  • Create vibrational energies

  • Block vibrational energies

  • Enhance balance and flexibility, you know like jewelry does

  • Include copper strands, because reasons

  • God knows what other kind of word salad.

• Supplements: Many athletes chug supplements like a Russian drunk with a jug of antifreeze. This quickly becomes a risky proposition in the Olympics, because supplements are not subject to any testing for safety or effectiveness or manufacturing process, and certainly not for purity, athletes risk consuming banned substances. Supplements for an Olympic athlete are all risk with zero benefit. Dumb.

• Oxygenated water: One of the newer fads, “oxygenated water” actually is possible to make, so long as the contents are under pressure to keep additional oxygen dissolved in solution in the water — of course it all escapes and it becomes regular water as soon as you open the container. This is a true coup d’etat for the marketers, who have somehow convinced athletes that they breathe through their guts. Bodies don’t work that way. Oxygenated water doesn’t even carry hypothetical benefits (except, perhaps, enhanced belching).

I feel I could go on all day, and I probably will once the Olympics are well under way and we see some new woo not even listed here.

On the one hand, it’s easy to say “They’re professional athletes, not rocket scientists” so we shouldn’t expect them to be making any particularly smart moves. But on the other hand, a professional athlete with any intelligence should understand that proper science-based care of their bodies is of the utmost importance at this stage of their lives. Their challenge is that there are simply too many salespeople surrounding them and their trainers and physiologists.

I’m a huge fan of the Olympics and you’ll always hear me rooting for Team USA. So I really hate this crap, and I hope you do too.