Extreme heat has reshaped elite sport this summer, athletes and organisers say
Extreme heat has changed elite sport this European summer and affected athletes across Asia, Africa and North America, the Guardian's 'The Hotspot' newsletter reported on 17 August 2026. Organisers, coaches and medical teams have been forced to alter logistics, timings and player preparation as temperatures rose.
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 in Toronto and said: “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.”
Several high-profile incidents this summer illustrated the effect of extreme temperatures on elite competitors: tennis players Ekaterina Alexandrova and Jakub Mensik collapsed on court, cyclist Tom Pidcock described the Tour de France as a “war zone”, referee Ilgiz Tantashev was later found to be suffering from heat strain after officiating France’s last-16 win over Paraguay, and 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 of Loughborough University, described in the article as one of the world leaders in preparing elite athletes for extreme environments, said: “The reality is that we live in a climate-change world. So either we stop playing sport altogether or we adapt.” The World Cup showed some ad hoc responses — mandated hydration breaks were used, but there were no additional measures for games with a wet bulb globe temperature of more than 32C, and there was no flexibility to extend the length of half-time except for the Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Madonna show in the final, despite Taylor saying “there [was] 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 article noted limits on acclimatisation time at the end of seasons can hamper preparation, a problem mirrored for recreational runners facing sudden warmth at events such as the London Marathon. Taylor argued that, with proper preparation, heat can be a competitive advantage: “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.” He warned, however, about athletes with “undeclared sickness, a prior viral load or diarrhoea, or ... perhaps on some undeclared medications” and stressed the need for a “heat deck” with appropriate medical expertise where “aggressive whole body cooling is the gold standard to protect health and potentially life.”
Taylor also outlined potential performance gains from targeted heat exposure, saying: “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.” He added that the heat makes training sessions more tiring and compromises recovery, creating a trade-off for teams and coaches.
On preparation strategies, Taylor said historical approaches are losing reliability because of extreme outliers: “We used to prepare for the worst possible outcome. 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.” He concluded: “And when the data doctor says the data can’t help, you know you’re in trouble.”
Autumn is approaching in the northern hemisphere and the Premier League kicks off on Friday, leaving clubs to weigh the performance gains from heat exposure against its toll on training quality and player recovery.