Extreme heat is reshaping elite sport — experts warn it must adapt to survive

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In today’s newsletter: how climate crisis is affecting athletes and what steps are being taken to protect them from rising temperatures

The mercury-shattering European summer pants alongside us on the back straight, looming as we hug the shadows, sweaty sandals on the parched earth. Across Asia, Africa and North America too , inhabitants have endured the warmest July of their lives.

In Toronto, Alex Hutchinson, author of the bestseller Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance , has just come back from an early run. “Here I am in Canada, a famously frosty country, and my general take when I wrote ‘Endure ’ in the 2010s was that heat was not that big a deal. Occasionally, people died of heat, often in the deep south of the US, often returning to football practise in August, when they were not prepared, but that was rare.

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