Nothing sharpens the distinction between professional athletes and the rest of us like a week of truly hot weather. While we’re apologetically crying off long-in-the-diary engagements – so sorry, just can’t face it in this weather – elite sportspeople are blinking the rivulets of sweat out of their eyes while squinting under a hot and heavy helmet, then doing 22-yard sprints with a couple of kilos of padding strapped to their legs.
As one of nature’s non-athletes, I speak not only with admiration but with genuine wonder. My experience of the past week has been working out how not to do things, or, if forced, doing them half-heartedly because, you know, I haven’t slept. My friends and I message each other the latest innovations in fan strategy (“apparently putting a frozen bottle of water in front of it helps”) and talk about our journeys on public transport as if we’ve just survived the Somme.
Since it’s now potentially fatal to cycle to the office – at least, that’s how I interpret the Met Office warning – I have largely stayed at home with the curtains closed and watched others exert themselves while wondering if they and I really belong to the same species.
I started with the tennis at Eastbourne, marvelling as the players sat coolly beneath their brollies, sipping electrolytes and managing their heart rates like unusually ripped Buddhas. They didn’t look half as uncomfortable as me and I was doing nothing except lie on a sofa and carp about the lack of air-conditioning in period conversions.
Jack Draper said after his first-round victory that the conditions were nothing compared with the enervating humidity on the North American circuit in late summer. “It makes me laugh a little bit when in the UK we talk about weather warnings … when it’s just hot, it’s usually pretty manageable.”
Fair point, but it makes me wonder: is this the week that British sport began to normalise extreme heat? As I sweat into my sofa I can’t help but notice the red alerts haven’t put off spectators – neither at Eastbourne nor at Roehampton, where the Wimbledon qualifiers are taking place. The TV cameras capture the heroic crowds: long lingering shots of long lingering queues for ice-cream, fans fannying about with fans. Plenty of folk are taking a leaf from Wimbledon’s own “beau geste” protocol for ballboys andgirls and draping towels down their necks beneath peaked caps, so that some sections of the stands resemble units from the French Foreign Legion.
I flick over to the cricket in Bristol, where a women’s T20 World Cup double-header is taking place and the temperatures are a mere 31C. What was supposed to be a sell-out crowd is missing about 2,000 children after some councils closed their schools. But for the 3,500 who have shown up special measures are in place: sprinklers for children to run through and a dedicated cool room in the pavilion that’s in constant use (it’s what Gilbert Jessop would have wanted). The County Ground’s preventive measures seem to pay off: St John Ambulance has five visits in the day.
Sports fans are famously hardy. Usually in Britain it’s the cold they’re braving – think John Motson reporting from Adams Park in the middle of a snowstorm or county cricket diehards huddled under blankets during the early games of the season. Now the mercury’s rising, perhaps sticking it out in the heat will become the new badge of honour. Instead of rain stopped play, now it’s the heat: at Roehampton this week Dan Evans was forced off court for more than an hour during his final appearance at SW19 when power to the electronic line calling system went out and play on all courts was suspended.
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There have been moments this week when it felt as if there was nothing to do but give in to the new normal. On Tuesday evening, the moon rose on sultry streets where drinkers who would normally be in the pub to watch England v Ghana preferred to gather on the pavement and follow through the window, if just to catch an occasional breeze. Life felt so European that pints became aperitivos and the late-night kick-offs in the World Cup suddenly made perfect sense. If this is the future, one wondered treasonously, how soon can we start taking siestas and lengthening licensing hours?
The All England Club has absorbed the lessons of last year when Wimbledon began and ended on days with amber weather warnings in place and Carlos Alcaraz paused his first match to deliver water to a courtside spectator who had collapsed from the heat. Changes are in place at this week’s qualifiers, additional water stations and an entire new “guest village” providing shade and shelter. The operations director, Michelle Dite, says the most important thing is helping people to prepare, and behave, appropriately for the conditions. “We’re providing an environment where people are very safe. We just ask them to take personal responsibility.”
The heatwave is due to be over by the time the tournament proper starts next week and predicted temperatures of 27C – what the tabloids might once have described as a SCORCHER – now seem relatively tame. But then, as Dite says, dealing with extreme heat is now “business as usual”.
That’s probably the most confronting element in all of this. Sports fans are a peculiar blend of optimists and fatalists: we consistently predict unrealistic happy outcomes for ourselves and our teams, while knowing, deep down, that the worst is inevitable. You could say that sums up humanity’s attitude to the climate crisis.
