Just Cancel the Damn Olympics Already

Add “extreme heat” to the rising checklist of plagues going through this yr’s Summer Olympics, an occasion I’m beginning to suspect I might very a lot not get pleasure from taking part in, even when they requested properly.

According to the Washington Post, along with being derailed by a world pandemic that pressured a full yr’s postponement in addition to a ban on all spectators, this yr’s Summer Games are additionally set to be roiled by devastating July temperatures in Tokyo which have some officers anxious for the security of the competing athletes.

“The rainy season is over in Tokyo, and the hot summer has come!” Tokyo 2020 organizers declared throughout a information convention on Sunday amid temperatures within the low 90s and air that the Post describes as “so thick it felt as if you had to chew it before you could breathe it.”

Although the summer season warmth at all times poses a danger to athletes, who’re competing at a degree of exertion that would put even probably the most physiological sound human in peril of warmth stroke or sickness, the Tokyo Games are poised to turn into the most popular in additional than 35 years of recorded temperatures, a circumstance that we might be attributed a minimum of partly to the creep of local weather change and world warming.

In a merciless accident, the climate in Tokyo final yr was unseasonably cool, owing largely to the truth that the area’s wet season stretched longer than normal. Those circumstances nonetheless would have posed challenges to athletes — as will this yr’s typhoons, that are nonetheless projected to happen proper on schedule — however the cooler temperatures would have helped to offset among the extra instant bodily issues of overexertion and warmth stroke.

In their efforts to arrange for the acute temperatures, organizers have taken steps to accommodate athletes which may endure within the warmth, together with putting in shade tents, transportable air conditioners, ice baths, coolers full of bottled water, and mist followers in designated competitors arenas. Some occasions have additionally been relocated to the northern metropolis of Sapporo, situated about 500 miles north of Tokyo the place the temperatures are barely cooler.

If you ask me although — and once more, no one did — I say we simply collectively take a literal rain test this yr and get our groove again in 2024, when Sha’Carri Richardson can run the 100-meter race in Paris in peace.