I’ve been a mite critical of your whole series here and now I see you’re keeping to your same 2005 science for athletes as well. No.
Athletes and their gut bugs who own them need lots and lots of carbohydrates. Actually, they just need lots of good, rich, healthy food. They need more nutrients of all kinds than non athletes.
They need a lot of vitamins D and K especially youthful athletes, which build great bodies for longer “careers” doing whatever sport.
There would have been no reasonable way for Michael Phelps to get the calories he needed from avoiding carbs.
Carbohydrates are not bad. You can’t have healthy gut bugs without them. They help regulate emotion and personality and brain well being. They are a low cost way to keep all nutrients up to date. It is ridiculous unless you are super rich to have to overeat animal proteins in order to get your body to turn them to sugar: it is also inefficient.
Athletes need healthy, clean legume and grain based carbohydrates (and they need to avoid all grain based carbs that are made from “enriched” flour, which is most of the things found in supermarkets) in addition to loads of healthy fruits, vegetables, and tubers.
There are no evil macronutrients.
Low Carbs = Low Insulin = Low Iron Uptake = Delayed Mortality
Ketogenic diets first proved the powerful benefits of this understanding in epileptics 80 years ago. Low caloric diets have significantly extended life in virtually every animal model tested. Most scientists have no knowledge of the iron loading in mitochondria as the source of ROS/inflammation and are therefore “completely out to lunch”
when offering simplistic advice on human diets.