The Baristas Fueling the Paris Olympics

Team Australia has a Flat White habit. They're taking matters into their own hands.

Jul 26, 2024

In just a few hours, the Paris Olympics will officially begin. If you’ve been reading The Word for a while, you know that we love inspiring, off-beat, and little-known stories about sports…which means we absolutely love the Olympics. Over the next several weeks, you can bet that we’ll be highlighting a ton of the magic coming out of Paris. Yet once the Games begin and medals are awarded, we’ll probably trend closer towards the “inspiring” end of the spectrum of “Word” stories than those that are a little more off-the-beaten-path. And so, before things really get started, why don’t we explore something a little wacky and wonderful together?

I’ve long been fascinated by the Games (modern-day founder Pierre de Coubertine once wrote that he established the Olympics in order to create…ahem!...“the ideal of a religion of sport”). The competition is of course entertaining. But even more than that, there is that ideal of a religion of sport. The bonding of athletes. The sharing of cultures. The global language of competition.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the Olympic Village, where 14,500 athletes will live over the next three weeks. In the village, no detail is overlooked: there is a salon with a dozen hairdressers, laundry rooms outfitted with 600 washing machines, and a cafeteria whose menu, featuring 500 different recipes, was developed in collaboration with a trio of Michelin-starred French chefs: Amandine Chaignot, Alexandre Mazzia and Akrame Benallal. In the village, athletes meet their peers from around the world. During an interview for our series In the Arena: Serena Williams, Serena told us that she first bonded with a young Swiss named Roger Federer at the 2000 Sydney Olympics while haggling for one of his Team Switzerland pins.

Each team also brings some amenities of their own. Team USA, controversially, is bringing air conditioning (USA! USA! USA!). The England team brought a special guest to welcome their team to the Village: none other than Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. The Fijian team gathers in the mornings to sing together.

But my favorite burgeoning Olympic tradition might be Team Australia and their espresso.

Australia—specifically Melbourne—has become known as “the world capital of coffee.” The Aussies love their morning flat whites. And during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, when the village was under strict Covid lockdowns, the Australian Olympic Committee wanted to bring something special and comforting for their athletes. Working with the Tokyo organizing committee, they arranged for a local barista to be on call for the team.

Little did they know that Elliot Johnson, a Melbourne native who had moved to Japan five years prior had started to make a name for himself in the Japanese coffee world. “The company that is in charge of the coffee cart—the owner of the Japanese branch has been a mate of mine [since I moved here],” Johnson said in 2021. “He sent me a message a few months back saying would you be interested in working at the Olympics in the Aussie village?” They had asked for a barista, but only fate could have brought them an Australian barista, one who—crucially—had already mastered the flat white.

Every morning, the Australian athletes would line up for their morning cup. Johnson made about 600 coffees every day, using a blend of beans from Papua New Guinea and Brazil. Australia earned 17 gold medals in those Olympics, the sixth most of any nation. Coincidence?

And so, two years later during the Beijing Winter Olympics, Australia repeated the tradition. Athletes pack bags full of equipment—pole vaults, shotputs, shoes, resistance bands—before heading to any Olympic Games. Meanwhile, Jacob King, a barista from Melbourne, left Australia with two La Marzocco Linea Mini espresso machines ($6,000 each), two Mazzer Major grinders ($2,500 each), and 225 pounds of coffee beans. He was welcomed with such fanfare that the athletes had King march in the Opening Ceremonies with them, the barista in full regalia. “There were a lot of people from other teams trying to sneak into the café,” King remembered in 2022. “Uniform jackets were swapped, under-the-table deals were offered, people snuck under tent sides. Australian coffee has that international reputation.”

For Paris, the Aussies are bringing three baristas—and strength coach Richard Louman is handy enough pulling an espresso shot that he might tap in to offset the morning rush. “When I took on this job, one of the first questions I was asked was, ‘Is the barista coming back?’ said Anna Meares, the former cyclist in charge of Team Australia’s food at the Games. “I’m like, ‘Why was the barista so good?’ And they said that it gave them a chance to socialize.”

The coffee stand will be open every day starting at 6 AM. From that moment on, athletes from every sport will gather around and swap stories. They will talk about their upcoming competitions, or where they come from in Australia, or what they think of everything in Paris. And in this way, the Olympic Village will be a little bit like anywhere else—with a coffee shop as a sacred ‘third place.’ Only in this one, when the customers stand up to leave, they’ll head to the pool, or the track, or the court. And nothing short of a gold medal will be on the line.

The Baristas Fueling the Paris Olympics

Team Australia has a Flat White habit. They're taking matters into their own hands.

Discussion about this post