Horses, guns and swords: How cumbersome equipment gets to the Olympics

While swimmers can shove a Speedo in a back pocket and runners can stash a pair of track spikes in a backpack, other Paris-bound athletes face an Olympian challenge in getting their equipment — from boats to guns to horses — overseas for these Summer Games.

Take a look at some of the most challenging items to transport and how the athletes manage them.

There is no shortage of precautions or red tape when Mary Tucker travels to a competition. The competitive shooter follows TSA rules to a T, of course, which be can be costly and tedious.

Her rifle travels in a hard case, and Tucker makes certain the air cylinder is empty so it doesn’t pressurize midflight. The ammunition travels in a separate container, and every box must be locked.

“We have lots of problems with the locks,” said Tucker, 22, who will be competing in her second Olympics. “… TSA has a tendency to cut our locks off. I’ve gone through about 30 locks this year just because they either can’t get into the case or they want to see what’s in it.”

She has to make sure the airline, TSA and customs agents know she’s traveling with weapons and ammunition, and she’s extra careful with her forms and licenses. She can’t clear customs unless the serial numbers on the guns match her paperwork.

Tucker is usually traveling with four or more heavy bags, which isn’t cheap. One recent flight to England cost about $700 for the bags alone.

“But there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said.

No single piece of sporting equipment is quite like a 17-foot piece of carbon-fiber composite that is long and flexible. If pole vaulting requires discipline and mental fortitude, traveling with poles requires patience and charm.

Veteran competitors know which airlines consider poles to be acceptable sporting equipment and which ones can be finicky. At last year’s world championships in Eugene, Ore., one airline changed its policy in the middle of the competition, which sent the athletes scrambling.

Mondo Duplantis, the world record holder and defending Olympic champion, learned at the ticket counter that his poles couldn’t fly with him.

“And we said, ‘You do because we’ve flown with you, like, 20 times in the last year,’” said Greg Duplantis, the athlete’s father and longtime coach. “… And she said: ‘No, you don’t understand. We don’t take poles anymore.’ And I said, ‘As of when?’ She said, ‘Today.’”

Duplantis walked to another airline counter that would accept the poles and bought last-minute tickets for the next flight to Oregon.

This dance can get even more delicate when flying internationally and navigating a language barrier. Matt Ludwig, who competed at the Tokyo Games, knows how to say “pole vault” in five or six languages. He makes sure to travel in his Team USA gear and is quick to pull out his phone to share videos and photos that might help explain why his long bag, stuffed with seven or eight poles, must fly with him.

“It takes a ton of patience and a little bit of navigating with some charisma and speaking skills,” Ludwig said. “I say: ‘I understand these look incredibly cumbersome and it looks like there’s no way that this is possible. But I assure you, we do it all the time.’”

Evita Griskenas prefers to take all of her equipment on the plane, which means the TSA screeners see an unusual assortment of items pass through the X-ray machines: a ball, clubs, ribbon, a hoop, rope. And that’s not even counting the bejeweled spandex.

These are the tools of the trade for a rhythmic gymnast, but they tend to raise eyebrows and draw questions from the uninitiated.

“Everyone in the airport’s just kind of like, ‘Hmm, what’s going on?’” Griskenas said.

The carry-on bag can get heavy. In addition to each apparatus, Griskenas, 23, travels with four leotards, each covered in hefty rhinestones and weighing about four pounds apiece.

While the clubs are certainly an atypical travel accessory — “You have to explain what it’s for and that it’s rubber and you’re not going to actually whack anyone” — the hoop tends to baffle people.

It measures about three feet in diameter and looks even more peculiar in its special case. Griskenas has heard it all: Is that a satellite dish? A trampoline? A bicycle tire? She hates checking the hoop as luggage because she has heard horror stories. “People have gotten them back as triangles,” she said.

After clearing security, she crosses her fingers that the flight crew is friendly and will allow her to stash the hoop in the coat closet or behind the last row of seats. Occasionally, airline employees will take it out for further inspection.

“And then they’re like, ‘Oh, do you hula hoop?’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah, I hula hoop.’ And then they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s so awesome,’” Griskenas said. “… And then someone will tell you a story about when they were like 15 and they were hula hooping because that was like a new invention. And you’re just like, ‘Oh, cool.’”

Every now and then, Sarah Newberry Moore finds herself explaining the complexities and nuances of sailing. For Newberry Moore and her sailing partner, David Liebenberg, the work starts long before the boat touches the water.

“When I explain to them the setup and the breakdown and the tuning and the boat work, they go, ‘Wait, you’re actually a mechanic also?’” she said.

The logistics that the duo must navigate are unlike anything else on the Olympic stage. The two sail aboard a Nacra 17 catamaran, a multihull vessel that is more than 17 feet long, weighs more than 300 pounds and has a mast that stretches 30 feet into the air. Getting the boat to France for the mixed-gender Olympic race took nearly two years of planning.

The boats are disassembled stateside, loaded into cargo containers and shipped overseas. On the other side of the Atlantic, the sailors must reconstruct the boat, carefully piecing together the hulls, beams, mast, three sails, two rudders, two daggerboards and all the lines that comprise the Nacra 17’s complicated rigging system.

“It can take hours,” Newberry Moore said. “It’s a day of work to get a boat from nothing into racing condition.”

But the slow travel time — up to four weeks via cargo ship — and tight competition schedule mean teams often have two or three boats in rotation, ensuring one is available for racing even as another might be in transit or in storage. For example, Newberry Moore and Liebenberg had to ship a boat — the Isabella Bird, named after the 19th-century explorer — to Chile last year for the Pan American Games.

They then flew to Europe to continue the race season, where another boat was awaiting. That boat — Lozen, named after an Apache warrior — is the one they’ll race in the Olympics. It was purchased in the summer of 2022 and shipped overseas in early 2023. It sailed in a handful of events, including the world championships in May, and mostly has been stored in Europe, awaiting the Paris Games.

The American sailors use a shared spreadsheet to keep track of the logistics for all three boats — everything from the ATA Carnet information, which is essentially a passport for goods, to the details for the handmade sails they’ll pick up in the Netherlands, which include the U.S.-themed spinnakers that had to be ordered more than a year ago.

“It was kind of weird and stressful to be buying Olympic sails before even knowing we were going to the Games,” Newberry Moore said. “But I’m glad it all worked out.”

Equestrian events are among the most quintessential of team sports on the Olympic menu. “We have the human athlete and then the equine athlete,” notes Hallye Griffin, the chef de mission for U.S. Equestrian who coordinates Olympic logistics.

And, notably, the two don’t travel together.

Equestrian athletes will fly commercial to France while their four-legged teammates will fly on special cargo jets operated by the Dutta Corporation that are specifically outfitted for horse travel, with stalls, hay, grooms and everything needed to make a horse comfortable for an overseas journey.

“They’re not actually very stressed in there,” Beatrice de Lavalette, a member of the U.S. dressage team who will be competing in her second Paralympics. “They have their food, their water, their snacks. They’re being checked on relatively often. All of my horses are veterans with this. They’re used to flying all over the place.”

Griffin began working on the logistics for the Paris Games right around the time the Tokyo Games were wrapping up nearly three years ago. Just getting to the Olympics is costly — well into the six figures for the U.S. team, Griffin said — and the checklist includes health certificates, equine medicine, water buckets, shoes and tools, plus food and vitamins.

The equestrian team shipped a 20-foot container via boat in June. It was filled with everything both horses and riders might need during their Olympic stay, including a veterinary trunk, a coffee machine and a panini maker. The container is air-conditioned and will serve as a workspace for the team at the competition site in Versailles.

Everything has to be timed out perfectly. Horses can get jet lag, just like humans, as well as “shipping fever,” a common bacterial infection that can affect their lungs. Some horses traveled overseas three to four months early, but the whole American team — riders and horses alike — planned to be in France by early July for a training camp before heading to the competition venue July 24.

“Many horses really enjoy it,” Griffin said of the journey. “They know they’re going on an adventure.”

For many athletes at the Paralympics, regardless of sport, the one essential piece of equipment is the competition wheelchair. These high-performance wheelchairs are different from what the athletes roll through the airport or around the Paris streets. They are faster, lighter, capable of making tight turns and cost several thousand dollars.

“In the abled-body world, you get a chance to lace up your sneakers and lace up your cleats and just go on and play the sports that you love,” said Steve Serio, a member of the U.S. wheelchair basketball team. “For us as Paralympic athletes, we have to use a brand new wheelchair. And my basketball chair costs in the realm of, like, $7,500. So it’s not just something that we can kind of lace up.”

How do they get to Paris? Serio said they’re “treated like strollers” — meaning they’re checked and stored under the plane with the rest of the cargo.

Brian Bell, another wheelchair basketball player, said he takes the wheels off the chair frame and checks them in separate bags, which means he’s doubly anxious about loss or damage. The chairs are too big and too costly to travel with a spare.

“It’s always on my mind,” he said.

Evy Leibfarth has shown up at airports around the world with two or three kayaks in tow, meaning she is well accustomed to the same skeptical looks. The boats are light but long, skinny and cumbersome.

“The airlines were never happy about that,” she said. “We’d always show up and be like, ‘Hey, sorry.’”

Friendly agents might let them pass, especially on shorter flights. Other times, Leibfarth, who will be competing in her second Olympics, had to plea or simply rebook her flight with other airlines.

These days, she has at least one kayak stored in several central locations across the world. She flies in, picks up the boat and drives it to the competition.

Some are simply too big to fit on a plane and have to go on a cargo ship weeks ahead of time. While a single-person kayak can be up to 17 feet long, the four-person boat can be 36 feet.

Many of the top competitors have sponsorship deals with boat companies that make travel infinitely easier. Nevin Harrison, who won a gold medal in sprint canoe at the Tokyo Games, will have a new boat waiting at each big competition. The manufacturer then will sell off that boat and get a new one ready for the next race.

“I’ll be getting a custom one for the Olympics,” Harrison said, “and that boat is only going to touch Olympic water, and then I’ll never use it again.”

Athletes without sponsors often have to rent boats at competitions or rely on secondhand boats that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

“My first world championships, they gave me the worst boat they had,” Harrison says, “and my coach even went up and was like, ‘You’re giving her this?’ They were like, ‘All we have, sorry.’ Then in that boat, I won the world championships. They came up apologizing and offering me any boat that I wanted from their fleet.”

Hadley Husisian concedes she has a type-A personality and knows other world-class fencers might travel differently. Her packing list is stored in a Google Doc; it’s two full pages with nearly 50 items on it — everything from her passport to Benadryl to her fanny pack. And, of course, her array of weapons.

Sure, Husisian might need just two epee swords at a competition, but she typically travels with 13 to 14 — “just to be enormously safe.”

“So it’s a bit cumbersome,” she said.

The swords are 3½ feet long — too big to carry on a plane — so those get checked as oversized luggage. Like many athletes, she travels in constant fear of luggage mishaps, so she tries to keep most of her equipment on her at all times. Much of her essential gear gets crammed into a carry-on bag for the overhead bin, including her uniform, mask, gloves, shoes, at least four body cords used for the electric scoring system and, of course, a lucky T-shirt she wears under her fencing jacket, which has served as Husisian’s secret weapon since she was 11.

“It glows in the dark and it definitely needs to be retired soon because it’s getting pretty small on me,” said the 20-year-old native of Oakton, Va. “But I can be pretty superstitious about these things. I bring it even though it’s a bit embarrassing. It has a soft spot in my heart.”

Nikita Ducarroz at times finds herself envious of other Olympic athletes.

“Sometimes I just wish I was a skateboarder,” she says, “and you can just skateboard through the airport.”

Ducarroz, 27, probably would meet airport security if she tried pedaling her BMX bike up to the gate. Riders used to stash bikes in golf bags to avoid steep airline fees for bicycles, but Ducarroz, who was raised in California but competes for Switzerland, said she can now take both wheels off the bike frame and fit all of the pieces into a large suitcase.

She usually travels with two bikes to a competition, so she rolls through an airport pulling two 70-pound suitcases, her clothes and other essentials shoved between the frame and under wheels.

The bikes are so specialized — from grips to pedals — that she can’t bear the thought of competing on anything else. Along with many other Olympic athletes, she now tosses AirTags in her luggage so she can track the equipment that is essential to her Olympic journey.

Bonnie Berkowitz and Jessica Koscielniak contributed to this report.