As summer rolls around, anticipation for the world’s biggest sporting event comes with a concerning alarm: this 2024 Olympic Games in Paris promises to be the warmest on record.
The quadrennial event, which will run in July and August, will take place amidst the backdrop of climate change and soaring global temperatures. According to an EU-funded report, last year was the warmest in history, one which saw scorching heat waves sweep across various parts of the world, including Europe. Heat-related mortality had also increased by a third in the last two decades.
With heat and humidity levels expected to be hazardous, athletes may be putting their health on the line in hopes of winning a gold medal or landing a new world record.
“What events are going to be affected by the heat? My short answer is: all of them, even the ones inside,” says Christopher Minson, an environmental physiologist at the University of Oregon.
How heat singes performance
Physical exertion and thermoregulation are competing physiological processes. Working muscles require a steady supply of oxygen from the blood, whereas staying cool involves spreading blood flow just under the skin’s surface.
As the body sweats, the blood volume decreases, so there’s less blood supply for laboring muscles. The heart has to work doubly hard to circulate blood as it juggles staying cool and oxygenating the muscles.
Extreme heat can cause heat cramps, nausea and fatigue. In more severe cases, it can bring heat exhaustion and heat stroke, which can be fatal. In a recent report examining athletes’ concerns about the climate’s impact on sports, several expressed fear of overheating.
Heat can erode athletic performances in subtle ways, even when an individual isn’t grinding under the direct sun. Commuting between training facilities and competition venues exposes athletes to the elements. Warmer nights may also throw off their sleep, which in turn disrupts mood, reaction time, and mental acuity come morning. Match-based sports like field hockey and tennis will see more tactical errors if players are too tired to think quickly on their feet. Even referees aren’t spared from making bad calls in the throbbing heat of day.
While anyone is susceptible to heat’s effects, elite athletes are particularly at risk of injury because they face pressure to win. Under the heat—meteorological and mental—they’ll often push their bodies past the limit.
“They are working for possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Christianne Eason, president of sports safety and education at the Korey Stringer Institute. Her institute was founded in 2021 after the Minnesota Vikings football player, Korey Stringer, died from heat stroke during a training session.
To beat the heat, athletes often rely on acclimation training weeks before competition. This normally entails working out in a heated room, overdressing, and visiting the sauna to get the body used to elevated temperatures. Eason and her colleagues helped the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team prepare for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics by running conditioning exercises in a heat chamber.
“There are no downsides, in my opinion, to heat acclimation, if it’s done right,” Minson says.
During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he worked with American marathon runner Dathan Ritzenhein to train for what forecasters predicted to be a warm race day. Minson credits this preparation for Ritzenhein’s outstanding performance as the top American finisher.
The benefits and cost of heat acclimation training is highlighting existing inequalities among Olympic athletes.
Some players have access to better facilities and coaching, and those without the resources to prepare—flying their athletes to warmer locations for heat exposure training, providing sophisticated gadgetry for monitoring athlete health, purchasing portable air conditioners as part of the competition paraphernalia—may suffer in their standing.
On the issue of AC, Donald Rukare, the president of the Uganda Olympic Committee, told the Washington Post, “we don’t have deep pockets.” In a previous sport meet in Turkey, Ugandan athletes stayed in rooms that lacked ACs, despite the soaring temperatures whilst their richer competitors shipped in portable units.
How are Olympic organizers preparing for extreme heat?
This won’t be the first time the Olympics’ organizers have to contend with heat and humidity. The groundwork for the games’ heat safety procedures was established at the Tokyo games in 2021, an event that broke temperature records for the warmest games in Olympics history.
No heat protocol had existed in the Japanese sports tournament scene prior to the games, says Yuri Hakogawa, a Waseda University sports science researcher and formerly an advisor for the Tokyo Organizing Committee for the Olympics.
Her team debuted the country’s first heat-specific emergency guidelines for the three-week tournament, paying particular attention to the outdoor endurance events. Some of the safeguards included ice baths for cooling heat-exhausted individuals and stations for measuring patients’ core temperatures. Among the most injury-prone events were the long-distance walks and marathons, which were held in temperatures that climbed to 95°F.
In certain events, up to 30 percent of the participants failed to complete their races, and many of them needed treatment. But thanks to the guidance developed by Hakogawa’s team, no one was hospitalized or suffered from complications. “All cases were treated on-site,” she says. “It was a success during Tokyo 2020.”
Now, the same protocol is in place for training medical volunteers at the Paris Games.
Adapting to climate change—without making it worse
The pressure to ensure peak performance has sparked a debate on whether rooms in Paris will be cool enough for athletes to get proper rest.
According to NPR, the Athletes’ Village will be chilled with water pipes running under the floors. The rooms purportedly keep 11 °F cooler than the outside, even in a heat wave.
To reduce the games’ carbon footprint, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo eliminated air conditioning for athlete housing. But after countries like the U.S., Australia, Great Britain, and Greece announced that their entourages would be bringing their own air conditioners, the organizers finally ordered 2,500 units to be temporarily installed.
All these units can tax the energy grid, but scientific literature supports resting in a cool environment after exercising in the heat.
“While I understand the need to reduce carbon footprint,” Hakogawa says, “to optimize their health and performance, I think the use of AC is ideal.”
As temperatures continue to rise, competition formats and rules may need to bend. The 2014 World Cup for soccer in Brazil created water breaks after 30 minutes of play instead of during halftime at the 45-minute mark. In 2022, the distances for the biking and running portions of the New York City Triathlon were halved out of concern of the extreme heat.
The upward trend of global temperatures may call for more drastic changes yet, especially for a sporting tradition that’s associated with the summer.
Eason and Minson both float the idea that the International Olympic Committee may one day need to consider moving the Olympics later in the year, such as in the fall, or to host countries in the southern hemisphere.
“I do hope ultimately that better solutions are brought forward,” Eason says. “This is not an issue that’s going away.”
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