Posted Aug 8, 2008 by Bill Ward
Updated Aug 8, 2008 at 10:23 AM
Each time the Olympic Games roll around, I’m just blown away by the gall of the advertising firm that handles official Olympic sponsor McDonald’s.
At the 1996 Atlanta Games, for example, they showed a commercial featuring a road race full of kids taking a detour into McDonald’s for a bite to eat. Yea, that’s what I want our kids doing—eating cheeseburgers and fries at the training table.

Now, 12 years later, they’re pulling off the same thing. This time, they start the commercial with chiseled track, swimming, volleyball, boxing and track athletes getting up early to train. “You gotta get up early” the athletes say, in order to succeed. Then they tell you that you have to get up early to get one of McDonald’s new Southern Style Chicken Biscuit!
Are you kiddin’ me? Do they really think we believe elite, world-class athletes fill themselves with friend chicken and biscuits? Do they think anyone north of the Mason-Dixon line will eat chicken for breakfast?
Maybe one day, they can convince northerners to do this. But young athletes training for the Olympics? Let’s hope not or the United States will stop winning the Summer Games total medal count. I’m not a nutritionist, but something tells me friend chicken and biscuits ain’t the “eat to win” diet our athletes need to succeed at the Olympics.
According to McDonald’s own nutrition guide, the chicken bisquit breakfast sandwhich has 20 GRAMS OF FAT, 8 grams of which are saturated, 410 calories and 1,180 milligrams of sodium.
There’s also stuff like partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate, artificial flavor, sodium phosphates, sodium aluminum phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, monocalcium phosphate and dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent.
Considering how hard they trained to get to the Olympics, doesn’t it seem crazy there’s a McDonald’s at the athletes village in Beijing? Ok, they could get a salad and bottled water there. What makes much more sense is the McDonald’s in the Main Press Center. From what I’ve seen of my fellow journalists at the Olympics, they’ve definitely used Mickey D’s entire menu as a regular part of their diet.
But McDonald’s for the athletes? P-lease!
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