What New Pseudoscience Quackery Will We See at the Paris Olympics?

The 2024 Paris Summer Olympics is upon us. Once again, the world’s greatest athletes will gather to get frisky, wow audiences with unforgettable performances, and show off a dizzying array of pseudoscientific nonsense.
Olympic athletes compete at the pinnacle of human ability. Here, at the limit of what’s physiologically possible, lifting a couple extra pounds or running fractions of a second faster could propel an athlete to gold and glory (not to mention a tidy cash payout). Thus, many turn to untested therapies, bogus supplements, and dubious gadgets to eke out that all-important edge.
In the past, the Summer Olympics has served as the ultimate showcase for pseudoscience in sport. At Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012, audiences noticed a colorful array of tapes plastered upon athletes’ bodies in almost artistic fashion. Since then, sales of “kinesiology tape” have exploded, abetted by eyebrow-raising claims that it “releases natural healing power,” “makes oxygen more available to your cells,” “helps remove waste products, cellular debris, and bacteria,” and “converts your body’s heat into infrared energy.” Studies show that it does none of those things, and is, in fact, just pricey tape.
The Rio Olympics in 2016 put a stranger piece of pseudoscience on display. Watchers couldn’t help but notice that the back and shoulders of swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, were splotched with large brown circles. They were bruises left by cupping, an alternative medicine that hails primarily from China. Practitioners apply heated cups to the skin to create local suction, essentially leaving giant “hickeys,” according to Yale neurologist Steven Novella. The practice is claimed to detoxify the blood (not a thing) and prevent it from stagnating (also not a thing), thus improving the flow of life energy called qi (also, also not a thing). In short, cupping doesn’t do what it claims.