It’s great weather for pétanque. Or fishing, provided you can find the water. With the planet gritting its teeth through a heatwave comparable to Martha and the Vandellas sharing a vindaloo in a sauna, playing sport comes with new challenges. In fact, even the thought of it is enough to break out in a sweat.
To speak for a moment in a personal capacity, playing five-a-side right now is a nightmare. You start off bombing around desperate to prove you’re still young, then quickly hit a wall. This is not the ordinary wall constructed from the reality of your lack of fitness, but a wall that has wheels and wants to run you over. Your face suddenly becomes a radiator, your legs two stacks of greasy plates. Your entire body is caught in a trap as the heat bounces down from the sky and back up off the polypropylene grass. Almost immediately the survival instinct kicks in and you remodel your game from marauding midfielder to defensive libero for whom the ability to read the play is much more critical than the ability to actually run.
There are upsides to being active in the heat. I take pleasure from accruing a salty crust across my face and returning home like I’ve just washed up from a shipwreck. Other people, with different physical qualities, may even enjoy the experience wholesale. Whichever way you feel about it, however, you can’t carry on as you would if it were a more typical 20 degrees with a gentle breeze and unrelenting drizzle.
So people start to adapt. The first change is carrying a water bottle. It’s de rigueur. As with all these things, what was once an incidental object is now a highly refined product designed to provoke envy in the eyes of other water bottle users. Check out this description on Amazon of one such product: “Sports Water Bottle With Motivational Time Markings – BPA Free Plastic Sports Drinking Container With Flip Nozzle, Fast water flow, No residual taste, Removable Straw And Leakproof Cap”. So as well as quenching your thirst, this bottle will survive the apocalypse.
Consumer capitalism is good in some ways. The fetishisation of gym gear that’s been going on for the past decade has actually provided us with a number of materials specifically designed to absorb and obscure unsightly puddles of sweat. But it’s interesting to note the little adjustments people are making as the heat roils around them, from the shifting patterns of the evening joggers to sudden uptick in enthusiasm for swimming (this is anecdotal, and derived partly from resentment at my inability to ever find a lane with fewer than four people cruising around it).
However awkward this season may be for the average punter, it ain’t nothing compared to what the professionals have to endure. Skulking at the back fanning yourself with your hand is, for them, not an option.
Over the course over this summer, it has been difficult not to sympathise with those pursuing high‑level athletic endeavours, be it on the football field in Samara (no Scandinavian should have to endure that), or Centre Court at Wimbledon (it was revealed that even the pigeon-scaring hawk Rufus was undergoing a special morning bathing routine to keep him cool this year). As for the Tour de France, it takes a very special physiology to race up mountains for hours when the temperature is nudging 90 degrees. A very special one indeed.
If Nigel Lawson turns out not to be right and we are in fact living a world in which the climate has been disrupted by human activity, then none of us are going to be able to carry on forever as we have to this point. And we will need more than fancy water bottles. After England’s Joe Root was hospitalised with severe dehydration after playing through temperatures in the Sydney Ashes Test that registered, on a thermometer in the middle of the SCG, as high as 57C, the ICC was criticised for not having a cut off point at which heat stops play. This is now a live issue in other sports too, with Tennis Australia recommending that matches should be suspended if the mercury goes above 34C. This is higher than the level set by the WTA but entirely at odds with the ATP, which has no allowance for heat-related breaks in the men’s game.
Professional sports will have to adjust as much as any amateur clogger. It will be interesting to see what happens in the UK in particular, given that our general response to extremes of weather (both hot and cold) seems to be to fall into a state of flummoxed panic. All will have to adapt, though, be it by doing more hot-weather training, staging more events indoors, or stitching together their own personal exoskeleton of battery‑powered fans. Watching those cyclists bombing up the Alpe d’Huez it also occurs that zips on everything would be a good idea.
Walking through a local park last weekend I experienced the odd, inverted sight of the only green thing in a sea of bleached straw being a carefully maintained wicket. In the medium term everyone is going to have to adjust to a new reality, but in the short term – like a cricket fan desperate for an ill-deserved draw – I’ll be praying for rain.
