PARIS — Henrik Christiansen has always been a dessert person, so he was excited that this year’s Olympics would be held here, in a country where bakers have to pass an exam to use that title. Éclairs, macarons, tarts: The options seemed endless.
Then he and his Norwegian swimming teammates arrived at the Olympic Village and he tasted one of the mass-produced chocolate muffins on offer.
“It was—” he starts, then sighs. “It was amazing.”
Christiansen, 27, posted his review—11/10—to TikTok and reported that the muffins were “the single greatest thing about the Olympics so far.”
“That’s the beginning of the lore,” he says now. He has since posted 10 more videos about the muffins, ranging from romantic (he and the muffin watch the sunset together) to illicit (a teammate catches him in bed with half a dozen muffins in his nightstand and chocolate all over his face) to dark (the muffin appears to be filming a hostage video). The views number in the millions. When he briefly deviated from his routine to post about the opening ceremony, his many fans demanded more muffin content.
my current olympics obsession is henrik christiansen, this swimmer from norway who’s obsessed with the chocolate muffins in the olympic village and can’t stop making tiktoks about them pic.twitter.com/v7MkOOj3o1
— aaalex 🪩🎀✨ (@dunebarbie) July 30, 2024
Civilians, volunteers and fellow athletes have begun to stop him for photos. (He remains sanguine about how recognizable his face is. “I’m usually carrying around a muffin,” he says. “That gives it away a little bit.”) He has been tagged in so many social media posts he can no longer keep track. They call him the Muffin Man.
He insists that the fame has not affected his reviews, nor have the other, comparatively disappointing options in the Olympic Village. “They really are this good,” he says. He adds, “I bet the French people are almost a little angry that the thing I love most here is the muffin and not a pain au chocolat or a croissant. But they really are good, and they're really moist, and they have chocolate chips in them. They also have a liquid chocolate center, which is kind of like the main attraction of the muffin, I'd say, the liquid center, and it's very rich. It's, like, a dark chocolate one. I really love that. Some people will maybe find it a little too rich. But it’s right up my alley.”
A few eagle-eyed TikTok commenters have suggested that the muffins bear a striking resemblance to the ones served in a chain of French cafeterias focused at university students (€3.30 buys you a full meal), but Christiansen has not yet investigated these allegations.
“I’ve been kind of busy competing,” he says. Oh yes, that: Christiansen is a distance swimmer competing at his third Games. He finished 25th in the 800-meter freestyle on Monday, and he will race the 1500-meter freestyle on Saturday and the 10-kilometer marathon swim next Friday. In his line of work, dessert is a necessity: Some days he needs to ingest some 7,000 calories. “That’s very hard if you’re only eating salads,” he says.
He does not much mind that these days, more people know him for his sweet tooth than for his swimming. “I actually like it a little bit, because I feel like TikTok is a really good creative outlet for a lot of athletes,” he says. “I know that a lot of us are often portrayed as just machines that do the sports and then they go home and just do nothing until the next time they train or compete. And it’s really hard for us to get to showcase our personalities through post-race interviews. It's always: ‘How did that race feel? How did it go?’ So I feel like this is a really good chance for me to broadcast who I am as a person, to get my personality across. And it looks like a lot of people really resonate with that, and they find me entertaining, which is a really big compliment.”
He does have one confession to make: “I think people will be disappointed to find out how few I’ve actually had,” he says, estimating that his muffin count numbers five or six in total. “I feel like people are expecting me to have five or six a day, but it’s not quite that bad.”
And the Games aren’t over. There is nowhere more romantic than Paris, and Christiansen and the muffins have plenty of time to take a stroll past Montmartre’s I Love You wall, scribble their names on a lock and attach it to a bridge, or perhaps spend a tender night at a rental apartment near the Champs-Elysées named, incredibly, Drury Lane.
No matter the outcome of his final races, Christiansen will leave Paris with his heart full of joy, and his pockets full of muffins.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Do You Know the Olympics’ Muffin Man?.
