Celebrating Sports with Asiad Biryani and Olympic Drinks

Did India’s last-minute medal surge at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games increase demand for ‘Asiad biryani’ in Kerala? This is a specialty of hilly areas, like Idukki, in which meat, particularly marrow-rich bones, is cooked with tapioca for a hearty meal.

One theory for the name is that it honours Shiny Abraham, part of Kerala’s golden generation of athletes, who comes from Idukki. Another is that the dish, also called ellum kapayam, is so loaded with energy-giving fat and complex carbohydrates that it is perfect for intense physical activity.

Several sporting events have associated foods. Strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. Sandwiches made with spicy pimentos and cheese at the Augusta Masters golf tournament. Mint julep cocktails made from bourbon, syrup and mint at the Kentucky Derby horse races. The bottle of milk drunk by the winner of the Indianapolis 500 race. Vada pav at the cricket matches played on Mumbai’s maidans.


But these are all linked to specific venues. With events that move around, like the Olympics and Asian Games, it seems harder to form a lasting food connection. Food items can trend during the games, especially with most athletes posting on social media. A rich chocolate muffin was the unexpected hit of the 2024 Paris Olympics, while at this year’s Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, it was a chocolate lava cake.

The Winter Olympics organisers this year also had one smart product with lasting potential — pasta shaped like the five interlinked rings of the Games. It came with a special recipe for making it, but plain pasta shaped in such a distinctive Olympic manner could be iconic at all the Games, not least because pasta is always one of the top foods eaten by athletes.

But this also underlines the problem with creating really distinctive foods for sporting events. Athletes are primarily focussed on functional foods for their sports, rarely wanting to risk something unusual. Usain Bolt famously ate only chicken nuggets at the Beijing Olympics, and duly broke three world records. Many teams now travel with personal nutritionists who will choose what their athletes will eat.

One of the few mentions of food at the first Asian Games, in Delhi in 1951, is that the Japanese team insisted on preparing their own food, avoiding what was provided by the Indian hosts. They topped the medal table, with 24 golds. India came second with 15 golds. The food at the second Asian Games in Delhi, in 1982, is better documented. Catering was handled by ITDC’s Ashoka Group, with their French executive chef, Roger Moncourt, credited with creating an international level operation.

Moncourt had insisted on importing cooking equipment that could operate at the scale needed. A report in the Akashvani journal spoke admiringly about “a cutting machine which washes, dries and cuts vegetables in different sizes in minutes, and an automatic machine to butter bread slices”. This enabled the kitchen to produce Indian dishes like “neelgiri korma, Goan fish curry, Madras chicken curry, murgh anarkali, gobhi mussalum, Kashmiri pulao and Kerala fish curry”, along with continental and Chinese options.

But the Akashvani report also highlighted another problem with organising events in India — whether and how to serve alcohol. No alcohol was provided in the Games village, but two stadiums were provided with bars “where liquor will be served to journalists covering the games”. The Times of India, in a report titled ‘No flood of foreigners for Asiad’, highlighted the problems in getting international attention for the Games, and India’s reputation for making it hard to get a drink was clearly not helping.

This will be an issue for Ahmedabad’s ambitions to host the Olympics. Here, the example of Helsinki’s 1952 Olympics might help. Finland strongly restricted alcohol sale, but compromised by creating canned pre-mixed drinks, whose sale could be better controlled. One of these, a gin and grapefruit soda called Lonkero, was so popular that it is still sold today, a lasting liquor legacy of the Olympic Games.