What do you do when your quest for Olympic gold has come to a disappointing end?

If you’re Australian badminton player Sawan Serasinghe, you hit the junk food – hard.

After failing to beat Chinese Taipei with his doubles partner, Matthew Chau, last weekend, Serasinghe decided to treat himself after months of healthy eating. He hit up the McDonald’s in the Athletes’ Village – where competitors and their coaches eat for free – and left with four hamburgers, two chicken burgers, six serves of large fries, 40 McNuggets, six brownies and a smoothie.

He posted a picture of his 6,000-calorie feast on social media for posterity.

“Have to say I am disappointed about the match today,” he wrote. “We definitely had a good chance to stretch the match to three sets towards the end of the second set but couldn’t close it out.”

“We would have loved to end our first Olympic campaign with a win against a much higher ranked pair. Although having said that, there are lots of good things to learn from the matches in the last three days playing against more experienced pairs. Can’t wait to go back home to start training and keep on improving!”

“Now it’s time to eat some junk food after months of eating clean!”

He’s not the only one.

Lines at the Athletes’ Village McDonald’s have become so long that the restaurant’s staff is limiting orders to a still significant 20 items per person. Athletes can request more – like Serasinghe, who ordered 23 items – but their order will get pushed back in priority.

“We’re so pathetic,” Samoan freestyle swimmer Brandon Schuster told The Washington Post when reporters visited the restaurant to see what all the fuss was about. “It’s raining, and we’re waiting in line for McDonald’s.” There were 53 people in front of him.

Not everyone is eating at McDonald’s to mark the end of their Olympic run. Many are patronising the place because the alternative – the athlete’s cafeteria – has proved so disappointing.

“If you go [to the athletes’ cafeteria] at peak times, it’s maybe one of the craziest experiences I’ve ever had,” American rugby player Jessca Javelet told the newspaper.

“Normally, in the cafeteria, the food isn’t good,” Cuban judoka Idaliz Ortiz said. “In practically all the arenas, it’s the same. So the whole world always comes here for American food.”

Of course, there are plenty of athletes who eat the stuff simply because they like to. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, US swimmer Ryan Lochte ate nearly every meal at McDonald’s, and he went on to win four medals.

But perhaps McDonald’s biggest fan is the world’s favourite Jamaican sprinter, Usain Bolt, who reportedly ate 100 McNuggets a day during the Beijing Olympics and who admitted in London four years later that he’d been enjoying “a few nuggets” in the lead-up to his event.

All of which rather begs the question: do the Olympic athletes know something we don’t? Perhaps McDonald’s is really a #superfood?