Heat-related issues and practical applications for Paralympic athletes at Tokyo 2020

Abstract

International sporting competitions, including the Paralympic Games, are increasingly being held in hot and/or humid environmental conditions. Thus, a greater emphasis is being placed on preparing athletes for the potentially challenging environmental conditions of the host cities, such as the upcoming Games in Tokyo in 2020. However, evidence-based practices are limited for the impairment groups that are eligible to compete in Paralympic sport. This review aims to provide an overview of heat-related issues for Paralympic athletes alongside current recommendations to reduce thermal strain and technological advancements in the lead up to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. When competing in challenging environmental conditions, a number of factors may contribute to an athlete's predisposition to heightened thermal strain. These include the characteristics of the sport itself (type, intensity, duration, modality, and environmental conditions), the complexity and severity of the impairment and classification of the athlete. For heat vulnerable Paralympic athletes, strategies such as the implementation of cooling methods and heat acclimation can be used to combat the increase in heat strain. At an organizational level, regulations and specific heat policies should be considered for several Paralympic sports. Both the utilization of individual strategies and specific heat health policies should be employed to ensure that Paralympics athletes' health and sporting performance are not negatively affected during the competition in the heat at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games.

Keywords: Paralympic; Tokyo 2020; heat; performance; sport.

Figure 1.

Hourly temperature and relative humidity for Tokyo during the dates corresponding to the Paralympic Games period in 2020, based on meteorological data collected from 1990 to 2018 [5]. Copyright permission has been granted from the authors of [5]

Figure 2.

Graphical representation of Paralympic athletes’ risk of thermal strain stratified by sport. The grey shaded dots represent indoor sports, while the white dots represent outdoor sports. The figure is subjectively determined through the combination of the demands of the environment and/or the sport (type, intensity, duration, modality) and the commonality of athletes within the sport that have impairments that affect their ability to thermoregulate effectively, e.g. athletes with a spinal cord injury.

Figure 3.

Heat exchange between the environment and the human body in an outdoor environment. In normal conditions, heat balance will increase due to an increase in metabolic heat production (M) and radiation in both shortwave (S_in and S_up) and longwave (L_in and L_up) radiation. A human usually loses heat through convection (C), evaporation (E), respiration (resp) and emitted longwave radiation (L_emit). The grey boxes highlight the heat exchange pathways (convective and evaporative heat loss and metabolic heat production) affected as a result of the Paralympic athlete’s disability, discussed in the review.

Figure 4.

Four key components of sporting performance in Paralympic sport; athlete, physical capacity, equipment, and the competition environment. To implement strategies that improve in-competition performance one must consider the physiological consequences of an athlete’s impairment on their physical capacity and the interface between the athlete and equipment. Strategies/interventions that could be utilized and implemented by Paralympic athletes to improve sporting performance at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games are highlighted in the grey-shaded box. This figure is adapted from [14].