The Hotspot | Extreme heat has changed elite sport this summer – it must adapt to survive

<p>In today’s newsletter: how climate crisis is affecting athletes and what steps are being taken to protect them from rising temperatures</p><p>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 <a href="https://wmo.int/media/news/record-breaking-heat-and-extreme-weather-continue">Asia, Africa and North America too</a>, inhabitants have endured the warmest July of their lives.</p><p>In Toronto, Alex Hutchinson, author of the bestseller <a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/endure-9780008308186/">Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance</a>,<em> </em>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<em>’</em> 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.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/17/extreme-heat-elite-sport-adapt-climate-crisis-the-hotspot">Continue reading...</a>