Extreme Sports.
Extreme heat.
Our science editor, Joanna Thompson, is also a professional runner and running coach. She is a 2-time Olympic Marathon Trials Qualifier. In 2018, she finished tenth in the Boston Marathon. She’s speedy. She’s also good at the work she does for us.
This year’s World Cup brought something new to the game of football: hydration breaks. At the halfway point way of the first and second halves, play stopped, the players went to the sidelines, drank water and hydration mixes, before returning to the pitch to resume play.
Purists were outraged. They slammed FIFA for defiling the game’s integrity with its ceaseless greed for sponsorship/advertising dollars. They had a point. FIFA’s ceaseless greed, to say nothing of its corruption, is epic. But in the event(s), quite by accident, FIFA did the right thing.
Soccer isn’t an “extreme sport”, per se. But in the sweltering heat of this summer, with on-field temperatures in most of the venues often reaching 105°(F), it resembled one.
What follows looks at “extreme sports” in extreme heat. Like hydration breaks in football matches, Joanna makes the case that change in extreme sports is coming and, more important, can’t happen soon enough.
Extreme Sports/Extreme Heat.
By Joanna Thompson.
In early July, I found myself standing on the side of a winding mountain road amidst thousands of polka-dot clad strangers, sweltering. We were there to watch Stage 3 of the Tour de France, a brutal climb on the border of Spain and southern France. The race is famously grueling. But this summer, an extreme heat wave added an extra element of difficulty — and danger.
As climate change raises temperatures worldwide and makes heat waves more frequent, events that used to be at the perfect time of year are quickly becoming too hot. Five out of the six hottest climbs in Tour de France history were recorded in the last seven years, and 2026 most likely broke those records. Race organizers for endurance events of all kinds are scrambling to combat the rising heat, with varying degrees of success.
This year’s Tour spanned just over 2,044 miles and smashed the event’s previous average temperature record by over 6 degrees Celsius. The heat was so severe, it caused the asphalt to bubble beneath the cyclists’ tires. Viewing was restricted at some stages due to wildfires raging across the countryside. Race organizers had to shorten Stage 9 by over 18 miles to protect the riders’ health — the first time in Tour history such a decision was made.
Intense heat can pose a serious threat to athletes, even those in peak physical condition. The biggest risks are to the kidneys, brain and lungs. When an athlete’s internal body temperature spikes too high, their muscle tissue starts to break down, resulting in debris that can enter the blood stream and cause kidney damage. Plummeting sodium levels from hours of intense sweating can lead to brain swelling or seizures. And poor air quality triggered by heat or wildfires (another major concern in this year’s Tour) can damage lung tissue.
If beating the heat were merely an issue of mind-over-matter, athletes would never suffer heat illness. Unfortunately, it’s not. In fact, endurance athletes’ ability to push their bodies through the warning signs of heat stroke — such as dizziness or ceasing to sweat — might make them especially susceptible to heat-related illnesses. My partner, a two-time Olympic trials qualifier, had his own dangerous brush with the heat during a triathlon last year — he kept pushing through hot conditions, collapsed just before the finish line and landed in the hospital for two days.
Likewise, Olympian Alicia Monson had to be hospitalized for heat exhaustion after the 2021 Olympic Trials 10k. And in 2022, a 32-year-old runner died during the Brooklyn half marathon from heat-induced cardiac arrest.
The longer the distance and hotter the conditions, the greater the risk: one study in marathoners found that every 1 unit increase in the heat index corresponds to a 22% increase in severe casualty. Another found that endurance athletes are 10 times more likely to die of heat stroke than a heart condition.
So far, endurance race organizers have looked at three main ways to potentially address the growing problem of exercise-related heat illness. The first and, shall we say, most creative solution is to build fully air-conditioned tracks and sports arenas. In 2019, Qatar unveiled a 45,000 capacity stadium with a retractable roof that acts as its own climate-controlled bubble. The facility was built to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, but it has also hosted a number of elite track and field events. Saud Abdulaziz Abdul Ghani, a.k.a., “Dr. Cool”, who engineered the stadium air conditioning system, has even suggested a similar sort of air-conditioned tunnel could keep the Qatari streets cool during a world marathon championship.
However, this type of manual cooling just isn’t feasible for most major marathons or endurance bike races. The Tour de France riders know this well — you can’t simply enclose thousands of miles of French countryside inside air-conditioned tunnels. So the next solution is to change the race’s timing. Several stars spoke out about the hot starting conditions this year. Australian rider Luke Durbridge called for earlier start times for the stages; for context, most stages begin between 1 and 4 pm local time, right around the peak daily temperature. Yellow jersey winner Tadej Pogacar went a step further, calling for a radical overhaul of the Tour calendar. Rather than riding in July and August, the event could take place in October or April.
But neither moving race times or dates is a perfect solution. For example, if Tour stages started in the wee hours of the morning, riders would still have to finish in the hottest part of the day. And clustering major running or cycling events around a particular time of year forces elite athletes to choose more carefully between races.
Finally, there’s changing the race’s geography. Events like the Olympics or the World Cup, which regularly change host cities and countries, may have to start choosing locations based on summer temperatures. Last-minute geographic changes have already been an issue for the Olympic marathon; in 2021, the race had to shift 500 miles north from Tokyo to Sapporo to avoid a dangerous heat wave. Unfortunately, according to a paper published in Nature, climate change could render certain countries unable to host a Summer Olympics by the end of the century.
Luckily, none of the 2026 Tour de France riders suffered heat stroke during the race, thanks largely to careful monitoring by their teams and medical personnel who were able to deliver fluids and ice mid-ride. But as we spectators climbed down from the summit of Stage 3, you could almost feel the next heat wave approaching the future of the event.