A Fine Line Between Summer Sizzle and Too Darn Hot http://nyti.ms/1aqnyUU Loading… See next articles See previous articles As the soccer world sweats and frets at the prospect of a summer World Cup in Qatar, the rest of the sports world gets on with business at usual: making elite athletes perform in extreme heat. Qatar 2022, now likely to be moved to a more reasonable season, would represent the ultimate athletic frying pan, with peak temperatures in the summer projected to go as high as 110 degrees. But the organizations that award and stage some major sports events have been raising and ignoring high temperatures for years without raising hackles to the same degree. “The heat always comes around; it’s like a permanent companion to these big events,” said Ross Tucker, a South African exercise physiologist and a co-founder of the website The Science of Sport. Think of modern-age Summer Olympics in steamy summer locales like Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Athens and Beijing. Think of recent world track and field championships in Seville, Spain — known for flamenco, Holy Week and its deserted midday streets in high summer — or in Osaka, Japan; or Daegu, South Korea; or, for a few unexpectedly torrid days last August, in Moscow. During the first week of this year’s Australian Open, where temperatures have sometimes soared past 100 degrees, players such as Julien Benneteau have used ice to cool off. Made Nagi/European Pressphoto Agency And think, to pick the hot topic of the moment, of the first week of this year’s Australian Open, where temperatures have sometimes soared past 100 degrees, leaving players reaching for their ice towels on changeovers or, in the case of Frank Dancevic of Canada, seeing visions of a cartoon character and then blacking out during play. “Inhumane,” Andy Murray, the British star, said of the playing conditions. “I kept waking up in the middle of the night last night just paranoid,” Serena Williams said Wednesday. “I just wanted to stay hydrated.” The tennis players, like so many athletes before them, have adjusted and managed remarkably well. The Olympic historian and author David Wallechinsky recalled the story of the British race walker Donald Thompson, who prepared for the muggy conditions of the 1960 Games in Rome in a time before sophisticated sports science and Bikram yoga for superstars. “In the pre-Internet age, he still knew what the weather was going to be like in Rome,” Wallechinsky said in a telephone interview. “So Thompson worked out in his bathroom by bringing in heaters and turning on hot water and filling the room with hot mist and then doing his workouts. He figured that one out.” But however aware and adaptable the competitors might remain, it does not mean that this is the way marquee events in sports have to be or should be played. “You don’t have an athletes’ union; you don’t have a trainers’ union that’s going to lobby as a group,” Wallechinsky, said. “The ones most affected don’t really have the power, the arguing power that the sponsors or the TV networks possess. It’s marketing: Where are the best months to get TV viewership, to get sponsorship, et cetera?” Wouldn’t it be better and fairer if the international sporting federations gave more weight in their scheduling and site choices to allowing athletes to perform at their best instead of throwing another obstacle in their path? Winning is tough enough in this era without having to worry about heat stroke as well as the rest of the field during a marathon. Tucker said: “Even if you can come up with strategies to minimize the effect of the heat, why not avoid them in the first place? If you can schedule these events to be in cooler conditions, then you must. Why introduce a variable that is so difficult to overcome? Why make it so challenging? That doesn’t make sense to the attractiveness of the product, but for the Summer Games, with London being maybe the exception, they are very rarely going to happen in a time when it’s not hot unless you go far north. Short of taking it to Montreal or Helsinki, you’re not going to get cool summer cities. Or you have to change the calendar.” The International Olympic Committee did move the 2000 Games in Sydney to September to account for the Southern Hemisphere’s weather patterns. But the Australian Open is, for now, firmly planted in January in the heart of the Melbourne summer despite intermittent proposals to move it later in the year to cool things off and create a longer buildup to the year’s first Grand Slam tournament. For now, it dovetails with school vacations and avoids conflict with other established tournaments in March, like those in Indian Wells, Calif., and Key Biscayne, Fla. The tournament has thrived in recent years, but the price it pays are weeks like this. The event has halted play on outside courts in the past when the combined heat and humidity readings reach a predetermined limit. But with humidity relatively low on the opening three days, the tennis continued outdoors, with the retractable show-court roofs open to the elements. “It’s not like they’re going rogue with throwing people out there,” Andy Roddick, the former No. 1 player, said in a conference call for the senior tour on Wednesday. “They’ve set the precedent for being smart about it, and they have done it in the past. I don’t think they should just close the roofs because people are writing about it.” It is not just about the athletes, of course. It is about the fans, which is one of the big arguments against summer soccer in Qatar and one of the big reasons Australian Open attendance has dropped off precipitously so far this year. A cooling trend forecast for the weekend could provide some relief, as well as more spectators. “What would happen in Qatar is that everyone on the field would just slow down by 10 or 15 percent; the games would change,” Tucker said. “But I tell you what: You’d have more medical emergencies among the fans than among the players, probably even corrected for the numbers. The biggest thing that determines how you cope in heat is your acclimatization. The players will know this; the managers will know this. A lot of the fans won’t have that luxury.” But even if FIFA does the right thing after voting for the wrong thing and changes Qatar’s dates, the world’s athletes still have more suffering on the schedule. There is Melbourne every January and the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where the summer heat and humidity can be brutal. A version of this news analysis appears in print on January 16, 2014, on page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Fine Line Between Summer Sizzle and Too Darn Hot. Order Reprints