No finish line: Temperature changes continue to impact athletes’ performances

From mandatory cooling breaks at the FIFA World Cup to midnight marathons and heat-suspended tennis, rising temperatures are forcing sport to rewrite its rules to protect athletes.

In 2025, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said the global calendar of Olympic sports may need to be “re-engineered” amid the challenges posed by climate change, after athletics’ biggest stars had to contend with searing temperatures at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo.

Roughly 75 per cent of athletes perceive a direct negative impact on their health and performance due to climate change.

Eighty-five per cent have expressed that the sport of athletics has experienced adverse consequences, according to the third annual survey conducted by World Athletics in 2023 to gauge the attitudes of elite athletes about environmental and social issues.

Professor of Sport Science and Biochemistry at University of the West Indies, Rachel Irving, says she witnessed the effect of the heat’s negative impact on Bryan Levell at the Tokyo World Athletics Championships last year.

Levell finished third in the 200m men’s final in a personal-best 19.64 seconds.

“He (Levell) was just losing too much water and didn’t look as well in the call room as he should, so I called Shanikie Osbourne to give him some Gatorade, mix it with some water, get him hydrated, let him pee” Irving said.

“Shanikie said, ‘Miss, we can’t do anything, he is in the call room’ and I was disappointed because I feel we could’ve been better prepared,” Irving continued.

Gradual warming isn’t the only worry for athletes, because natural cycles like El Niño, which releases heat from the ocean, can push temperatures even higher from one year to the next.

National team doctor Dr Gwyn Jones shares how detrimental being dehydrated can be if proper precautions are not taken.

“It is critical that you are adequately hydrated because you might not feel it, even if you don’t feel thirsty. But if you are dehydrated — like mildly, like two per cent, three per cent — your performance falls 10-15 per cent below optimum; and that is why if you look at athletes in certain events like the sprints, they walk with their water up to the race at the starting blocks,” Dr Jones said.

Irving said there are ways that the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA) can help to limit the negative effects of climate change on athletes.

“When it is too cold it can cause injury ... but how do we mitigate that if it’s too cold? We are in this century, we have thermal clothing. Do we have thermal clothing that we run in? You have clothing that is sensitive now, (and) based on your body temperature it warms up.”

However, Dr Jones, while not directly responding to Irving’s comment, says the JAAA does what it can to protect the athletes.

“It is usually when it’s colder than what is expected that we might have to ship in some extra warm clothing ... proper dress in terms of if it is cold, proper kind of thermal clothing, proper kind of tights, and you try and recommend that to the athletes, and most athletes adjust accordingly. Sometimes they don’t and might end up with cramps or strains,” said Dr Jones.

Former national discus record holder and many time national champion Fedrick Dacres is encouraging athletes to pay more attention to their own bodies.

“As athletes, we are usually spoilt in terms of we really don’t need to know about what is really going on, because we are normally taken care of by our managers,” Dacres said.

However, Dacres added that athletes needed to be more educated on ‘what is going on’.

As the planet keeps warming, Jamaican athletes, who train and compete in some of the hottest and coldest conditions in the world, must find a way to adapt and do so quickly.