Curled up in a small white rectangle of fabric lying on the grass of a park bench in Paris, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon carelessly It created a big stir on the Internet Just sleeping outside. The moment, posted to social media by fellow Olympians on Monday, came a week after Ceccon failed to qualify for the men’s 200-meter backstroke final, despite having just won gold in the 100-meter event.
in Interview In an interview with Italian television, Ceccon blamed the poor sleeping conditions in the Olympic Village, especially the heat, for his performance. This week, media speculated that the uncomfortable temperatures may have also been to blame for his outdoor naps, stoking concerns already swirling about the impact of extreme weather on this year’s Summer Olympics. (Italian Swimming Federation) Denied One theory is that Ceccon’s nap is related to the situation in the Olympic Village.
A few weeks before the Paris Olympics Weather forecasters and athletes alike There are fears the Games will be the hottest on record, surpassing the 2021 Tokyo Games when temperatures reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity was high. 100 athletes receive medical attention The number of heat stroke cases increased, and many more non-athletes followed suit. While the fate of this year’s Olympics remains to be seen, a heat wave spread over Paris on July 29th and continued for four days. 97 degrees Fahrenheit The first week of the tournament has begun.
In the scorching weather, national teams scrambled to loan out players to keep them in tip-top condition. Air conditioning Staying in a bedroom in the Olympic Village Ice VestThe Australian Olympic Committee Cutting-edge monitors It records ground temperature, radiation, humidity and wind speed and provides personalized advice to help athletes manage their risk of heatstroke. For some outdoor sports, such as tennis and soccer, Additional breaks It was activated because the temperature exceeded a certain safety limit.
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Climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme and deadly heat waves. Ring of Fire IIAccording to the Olympic Heat Report, released before this year’s Olympics begin on July 26, the average summer temperature in Paris is 3.1 degreesSince 1924, when the City of Light last hosted the Olympics, the temperature has been about 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Climate change ruined the Olympics yesterday” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at World Weather Attribution, an academic project that studies the impact of climate change on the weather, on July 31. “If the atmosphere was not overloaded with emissions from fossil fuel combustion, Paris would be around three degrees cooler and much safer for sports.”
For athletes, a few degrees can make a big difference. When the temperature is high, the body Let the heat escape Increased body temperature can affect performance and health. A 2023 study of marathon and race walking runners found that an increase in core body temperature of 2.7 degrees can lead to up to 20 percent slower Performance time is also reduced. And when the body tries to cool itself down, it sweats and dilates blood vessels. When these mechanisms become too active, Dangerous health risks Symptoms include dehydration, organ failure, and heart attacks. The longer the heatwave lasts, the more likely it is that The impact becomes more lethal.
Extreme heat has affected a wide range of sports. The Rings of Fire report, produced by the UK Institute for Sustainable Sport in collaboration with Australian environmental group FrontRunners, collected stories from top athletes across 15 sports about how the heat has affected their careers and health. In the report, British swimmer Hector Pardoe described how heatstroke during a competition in Budapest left him vomiting, unable to move and “nearly paralyzed”. For Japanese race walker Yusuke Suzuki, heatstroke was a torturous ordeal that took two years to recover from.
Lessons from the World Cup: How climate change will change sport
“This problem isn’t going to abate,” said Mike Tipton, a human physiology researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the UK who contributed to the report. Tipton is encouraged by changes being made across the sports world to protect players and fans from extreme heat, such as hydration breaks and cool-down stations, but he also cautions against losing sight of the importance of mitigating one direct cause of climate change: human burning of fossil fuels.
The organizers of the Paris Olympics would agree. In the years leading up to the games, the committee has been working on unprecedented A Commitment to Sustainability There have been many challenges, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half for the recent Olympics. But the decision to cut energy use by building Olympic Village dormitories with geothermal cooling rather than air conditioning, along with a 60% plant-based menu, are key to success. Main Source Complaints about the players’ accommodation. Romanian table tennis player Bernadette Shokus said: He told the Guardian The fans provided in her dorm room were not enough: “You would feel it was too hot in the room,” she said.
“We have a lot of respect for the comfort of the athletes, but we are thinking more about the survival of humanity,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station in 2023. About the decision They instructed people to refrain from using air conditioning, but as temperature forecasts and concerns grew, organizers finally relented. 2,500 air conditioners For teams willing to pay, like the South Korean swimming team, Staying in a hotelThese unequal access to amenities 2 layers game.
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Experts agree that air conditioning can create a competitive advantage. “Staying cool at night is a key factor in managing the risk of heatstroke,” said Richard Franklin, a professor of public health and tropical medicine at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. Franklin added that heatwaves are often accompanied by rising night-time temperatures, which can prevent the body from fully recovering, and that lack of sleep and the physical demands of competition can increase the risk.
There are other ways athletes can reduce the risks of competing in high temperatures.
“The best thing you can do is let your body acclimate before the game,” says David B. Schneider, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto and author of Books As for how global warming is changing sports, she says: Each sport comes with its own risk factors, such as the amount of time spent on exposed pavement and the duration of play. But she says exercising in the heat is essential for any athlete to properly condition their body before competing. “It doesn’t eliminate the risk, but it pushes the limits of how much you feel the effects, which makes a huge difference.”
He is a lecturer in public health at James Cook University. 2024 Papers Researchers who analyzed the impact of extreme heat on large sporting events said other factors, such as the availability of shade and existing health conditions, also needed to be taken into account in athletes’ heat-safety plans. Paralympic athletes, for example, often use equipment such as wheelchairs that can trap more heat.
Tipton, Oh and Mason all agreed that the growing dangers of climate change will eventually force Olympic organizers to move the Summer Games to cooler weather periods. Tipton said the good news is that teams and federations are starting to take the heat risks more seriously. “The nature of sports is changing in terms of rules, regulations and acceptable cooling strategies,” he said.
Top-down rulemaking on safety restrictions will be even more important in managing risk, Mason said, because given the high risks and pressures of competing, athletes are often unwilling to back out when temperatures get dangerously high.
“Athletes aren’t going to pull out if the temperatures are a few degrees warmer,” she said. “We need policies in place that give us recourse so we’re not putting these decisions in the hands of athletes who have trained their whole lives for this sport.”
