The Conversation (0)
Sinead Butler
Jul 28, 2021
The TikTok showed baseball player Wanger and his teammates finding out how strong the cardboard beds are
TikTok/bwangah
Olympians have put their Olympic Village’s cardboard beds to the ultimate test.
In a TikTok, the Team Israel baseball player Ben Wanger decided to investigate just how many people the bed could take.
The cardboard beds made headlines at the start of the Games as rumours circulated that they were built to prevent Olympians from having sex with each other - this was proven to false.
Despite this rumour being untrue, people were still fascinated with the design as its not a material you typically imagine as a base for a bed.
Airweave, a Japanese company made the beds which are recyclable.
Back in January 2020, Takashi Kitajima, the general manager of the Athletes Village, told the Associated Press that the beds can hold up to 440 pounds (just under 200kg).
A the beginning of the TikTok, Wanger said: “Been getting a lot of questions about the beds in the Olympic Village, so today we’re gonna check and see how many Israelis it takes to break one of these cardboard beds.”
He recruited eight of his fellow teammates to see how much weight the bed could hold.
Wanger stood on the bed alone, before his teammates piled on, one-by-one to see how strong it was.
Impressively, nine people are on the bed at once but it was when the group decided to jump on the mattress simultaneously that the structure collapsed.
The Lancaster Barnstormers player then pans the camera to show the extent of the damage, where the cardboard structure has clearly been crushed by the weight.
Looks like Wanger is going to need a new bed...
Within the first day of uploading it, the TikTok received over 280,000 views, but he now appears to have deleted the video.
Can’t imagine organisers are too happy with his little experiment.
However, it’s not the first time the now-infamous cardboard bed has been put to the test and gone viral online.
Irish gymnast, Ryan McClenaghan posted a video of himself jumping on his cardboard bed to disprove the sex prevention rumours.