Rolled up on a small, white rectangle of fabric on the grass at a park bench in Paris, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon accidentally took the internet by storm simply by sleeping outside. The moment, posted on social media by a fellow Olympian on Monday, came a week after Ceccon failed to qualify for the men’s 200m backstroke final despite having just won gold in the 100 meter item won.
In an interview with an Italian broadcaster, Ceccon blamed his performance gap on poor sleeping conditions in the Olympic Village – namely heat. This week, media speculation that the uncomfortable temperatures were also behind his afternoon nap fueled an already seething pot of concern about the impact of extreme weather on this year’s summer games. (The Italian Swimming Federation deny that Ceccon’s nap is related to conditions in the Olympic village.)
In the weeks leading up to the Paris Olympics, weather forecasters and athletes fears the games could become the hottest on record, surpassing the 2021 events in Tokyo, where high humidity and 90 degree Fahrenheit days led 100 athletes to seek medical help for heat illnesses; even more non-athletes followed suit. While it is too soon to know how this year’s games will play out, a punishing heat dome settled over Paris on July 29, lasting for four days and temperatures reaching highs of 97 degrees F as the first week of the matches was underway.
During the scorching weather, national teams rushed to keep their athletes in tip-top shape, air conditioners for their bedrooms in the Olympic Village and to offer them ice jackets. The Australian Olympic Committee even invested in state-of-the-art monitors to record temperature, radiation, humidity and wind speed on the ground, resulting in personalized recommendations to help their athletes manage heat risks. For some outdoor sports, such as tennis and soccer, new protocols for additional rest breaks was activated as temperatures exceeded pre-set safety thresholds.
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Climate change is increase the frequency of extreme and deadly heat waves. Rings of Fire IIA report on Olympic heat released before this year’s games began on July 26 found that average summer temperatures in Paris with 3.1 degrees Celsiusor about 5.6 degrees F, since 1924, the last time the City of Light hosted the games.
“Yesterday Climate Change Collapsed the Olympics,” said climatologist Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution, an academic project studying the impact of climate change on meteorology, on July 31. “If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuels, Paris would be around 3 degrees C cooler and much safer for sports.”
Just a few degrees can make a big difference for athletes. In hot temperatures, the body is less able to do this turn off the heat it generates, which can affect performance and health: A 2023 study of marathon and race-running athletes found that a 2.7 degree F increase in core body temperature up to 20 percent slower performance times. And as the body tries to cool down, it sweats and dilates blood vessels. When these mechanisms are pushed too hard, it results dangerous health risks – such as dehydration, organ failure and heart attacks. And the longer a heat wave drags on, how more deadly the impacts.
Extreme heat affects a wide variety of sports. The Rings of Fire report, a collaboration between the British Association for Sustainable Sport and Australian climate advocacy group Frontrunners, documented stories from elite athletes across 15 sports about how extreme temperatures affected their careers and health. In the report, British swimmer Hector Pardoe said he was “practically paralysed” after a heat stroke that left him vomiting and motionless during a competition in Budapest. For Yusuke Suzuki, a Japanese race walker, heatstroke was a torturous ordeal that took two years to recover from.
“Going forward, I don’t see it being less of a problem,” said Mike Tipton, a human physiology researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the UK who contributed to the report. While Tipton is encouraged by the changes he sees happening across sports to protect athletes and fans from extreme heat — such as water breaks and cooling stations — he also cautions against the importance of mitigating the direct cause of climate change: people burning out of sight to lose fossil fuels.
The organizers of the Paris Olympics seem to agree. In the years leading up to the games, the committee was unprecedented sustainability pledges such as cutting the greenhouse gas emissions from recent Olympics in half. But, along with a 60 percent plant-based menu, the decision to reduce energy use by using Olympic Village dormitories with geothermal cooling, rather than air conditioning, has main source of athletes’ complaints about the accommodation. Bernadette Szocs, a Romanian table tennis player, told The Guardian that the fans provided in dorm rooms were not enough. “You can feel it’s too hot in the room,” she said.
“I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think much more about the survival of humanity,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station in 2023 about the decision to avoid air conditioning. But as temperature projections and concerns mounted, the organizers finally waved goodbye and ordered 2,500 air conditioning units for teams willing to pay for it. Some, like the Korean swimming team, have chosen stay in hotels. Unequal access to such facilities has raised concerns about two-level games.
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Experts agree that air conditioning can create a competitive advantage. “Being able to cool down at night is an important part of managing heat risk,” said Richard Franklin, a professor of public health and tropical medicine at James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia. Franklin added that heat waves often come with higher nighttime temperatures that prevent the body from fully recovering, and that lack of sleep and the physical stress of competition can increase risks.
There are other ways athletes can reduce the dangers of competing in high temperatures.
“The best thing you can do is prepare before the games by acclimatizing your body to the conditions,” says Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto and author of a book about how global warming is changing sports. She says that each sport has unique risk factors, such as time spent on open pavement, or duration of play. But for any athlete to properly synchronize their body before competition, she says, training in the heat is crucial. “It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it pushes the boundaries of when they feel the impact. It makes a big, big difference.”
Hannah Mason, a public health lecturer at James Cook University and lead author of a 2024 paper analysis of the impact of extreme heat on mass sporting events, said other factors — including the availability of shade and pre-existing health conditions — should be considered in athletes’ heat preparedness plans. For example, Paralympic athletes often use equipment, such as wheelchairs, that can trap more heat.
Tipton, Orr and Mason all agreed that the increasing dangers of climate change will eventually leave Olympic organizers with no choice but to change the timing of summer games to occur during cooler weather months. The good news, says Tipton, is that teams and athletics federations have begun to take the risk of heat more seriously. “We’re seeing the nature of sport change in terms of the rules, regulations and allowable cooling strategies,” he said.
According to Mason, more top-down rulemaking on safety limits will be crucial to managing risk. With the high stakes and pressure of competition, he says athletes are often unwilling to back down, even when conditions get dangerously hot.
“If it’s a few degrees too hot, they’re not going to retreat,” she said. “We need policies to fall back on so we don’t put these decisions in the hands of athletes who have trained their whole lives for that event.”
