The mercury-shattering European summer pants alongside us on the back straight, looming as we hug the shadows, sweaty sandals on the parched earth. Across Asia, Africa and North America too, inhabitants have endured the warmest July of their lives.
In Toronto, Alex Hutchinson, author of the bestseller Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, has just come back from an early run. “Here I am in Canada, a famously frosty country, and my general take when I wrote ‘Endure’ in the 2010s was that heat was not that big a deal. Occasionally, people died of heat, often in the deep south of the US, often returning to football practise in August, when they were not prepared, but that was rare.
“Now I’m a lot more cautious. My general thesis is that the brain is pretty good at protecting you. Even if you try to deliberately run yourself to collapse, you won’t be able to. You’ll get tired before that happens. But heat is one of the very few things that can trick the brain’s protective circuitry.”
This summer has felt like a sea change in elite sport. Somehow we have reached a stage where it is no longer shocking to see a tennis player collapse on court, like Ekaterina Alexandrova in Memphis or Jakub Mensik in Paris. Cyclist Tom Pidcock called the Tour de France a “war zone” and much-mocked referee Ilgiz Tantashev, who officiated France’s chaotic last-16 win over Paraguay, was later found to be suffering from heat strain. On 7 August, the young Fijian rugby player Saimoni Vunilagi died of suspected heatstroke in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka, where temperatures had hit 35C, after training with his club, Kyuden Voltex.
Dr Lee Taylor, from Loughborough University, is one of the world leaders in preparing elite athletes for extreme environments, “The reality is that we live in a climate-change world,” he says. “It’s inevitable, whatever sport you play, at whatever level, that more of that training and playing is going to be in a hot environment. So either we stop playing sport altogether or we adapt.”
Logistics, timings, player preparation, shading, cooling, all can be tweaked, and we saw some of those adaptations in the World Cup – scatter-gun style. There were mandated hydration breaks, but nothing extra for games with a wet bulb globe temperature [a measure of heat stress on the human body] of more than 32C. There was no flexibility to extend the length of half-time – except for the Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Madonna show in the final – despite there being, in Taylor’s words, “a clear rationale to do so in some games as a very robust way to make the players safe by reducing their body temperature”. The dollar held the upper hand.
One of the challenges in preparing players for the World Cup was the limited number of days for acclimatisation at the end of the season. In recent years, recreational runners have hit a similar problem at the spring time London Marathon, a suddenly warm day when many participants have not had a hot run for six months.
But given adequate preparation time, experts like Taylor can see the heat as a performance opportunity for elite athletes. “If you look at the [2019] Doha World Athletics Championships, for example, up to 40% in the road races did not finish because they weren’t prepared properly, so just by being prepared appropriately you’ve beaten nearly half the field.
“What I worry about is athletes who have undeclared sickness, a prior viral load or diarrhoea, or are perhaps on some undeclared medications – that can be quite a dangerous combination to exercise in the heat. Or if an event isn’t well prepared with something we call a ‘heat deck’ – appropriate medical expertise and facilities to rapidly cool someone with a potentially fatal exertional heat stroke – where aggressive whole body cooling is the gold standard to protect health and potentially life.”
Autumn is approaching in the northern hemisphere and with it the Premier League, which kicks off on Friday. Taylor thinks the unseasonable heat could have brought pre-season advantages. “If someone has engaged in about six weeks of heat training, they can expand their haemoglobin mass by approximately 3%-6%. That’s the same type of adaptation we get in those red blood cells at an altitude camp – super desirable for our elite athletes.
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“So clubs will be regarding the weather in some parts as a performance opportunity. Most were probably looking to expose their players to the heat to gain some of those adaptations. The challenge is getting the quality of the training sessions because doing anything in the heat is more tiring and it compromises your recovery.”
But there is an existential problem, for elite athletes, and the rest of us – the unpredictability of the future. Diligently doing your homework is no longer good enough. “We used to prepare for the worst possible outcome,” says Taylor. “What does the historical data tell us is going to be the most challenging humidity and heat? But that’s gone out the window over the last five years because we have these crazy outliers.”
And when the data doctor says the data can’t help, you know you’re in trouble.