Reports | Cooling tech to come to the rescue at hot-house Doha during World Athletics Championships
Athletes competing at the World Athletics Championships, which kicks off in Doha on Friday, will warm up on a hot and humid field but they will then make their way 150m through a unique cooling tunnel into the air-conditioned Khalifa stadium. The timing of the races has been shifted to nighttime.
Athletes competing at the IAAF World Championships, which will kick off in Doha on September 27 (Friday), will warm up on a field where daytime temperatures reach 38 degrees celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) and humidity hovers around 50 per cent. They will then make their way 150 metres (165 yards) through a unique cooling tunnel into the air-conditioned Khalifa stadium where the climate will be maintained at a pleasing temperature of 23-25 degrees.
The sophisticated system is being organised by Qatari authorities as proof that they will be able to keep the 2022 FIFA World Cup venues at playable temperatures, despite controversies over the Gulf country hosting it.
Sebastien Racinais, head of athlete health and performance research at Aspetar, the Gulf's first specialised sports medicine hospital said to the AFP that the athletes “will have a thermal journey” when a computerised system will prepare athletes' bodies for the differential by lowering the temperature in stages as they proceed through the brightly lit underground walkway into the 46,000-capacity venue.
Racinais said that athletes would be readily able to adapt to the extremes of heat and humidity of Qatar's Arabian desert climate if given time to acclimatise as humans have the “best heat adaptation capacity.”
“After a few days of training in the heat, the athletes will undergo some heat adaptations,” he said in his office overlooking the World Championship warm-up field.
Repeated exposure to the local climate would also allow athletes to increase their sweat rate “improving the efficiency of the cooling at the skin-level”, he explained.
Khalifa Stadium, the principal venue for the Championships, opened in 1976 and was entirely overhauled ahead of a relaunch in 2017. Its elaborate cooling system has been deployed during other high-profile athletics meetings including Diamond League events.
“It is not strange that the world championships are held in summer or heat -- but be assured that we care for the safety of players and crowds,” Qatar's chief organiser for the Worlds, Dahlan al-Hamad, told the AFP.
Organisers are understood to have disabled low-level vents in the stadium to eliminate any chance that air currents could affect events such as the javelin. Doha organisers have dramatically changed the timing of the road races, staging them in the nighttime and shifting the marathon to midnight in a first of its kind move.
“Before 2008 in Beijing (Olympics), everyone was saying it would be impossible to run a fast marathon because of heat -- but at the end Samuel Wanjiru established a new Olympic record of two hours six minutes,” said Racinais assuring that there will not be any drastic changes in the timing of the athletes due to the climate
While the majority of the attention has been paid to the issue of heat at the 2022 football World Cup, the conditions of Doha 2019 for the IAAF Championships will be far more similar to those expected at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan. Aspetar, who has been collaborating with the International Olympic Committee ahead of the Tokyo Games, expects it to be the hottest Olympics in history.
Just 15 per cent of athletes at the 2015 World Championships in China prepared specifically, while a year later 38 per cent of participants at the UCI cycling world championships in Qatar had done so.
“There is also a current trend to use heat as a training stimulus in the same way as we have been using altitude training camps for years,” said Racinais, who was surrounded by electronic heat and humidity monitors due to be used by officials during the Championships.
