Australia’s Olympic Sevens team going to extreme lengths to prepare for Tokyo heatwave
The heat-related deaths of dozens of people in Japan in the past two summers has forced Australia’s Olympic hopefuls to take drastic steps to prepare for the intense heat in Tokyo next year.
Australia’s champion women’s Rugby Sevens players have been locking themselves in heat chambers to try and prepare themselves for the killer weather conditions they will face at next year’s Tokyo Olympics after dozens of heat-related deaths in Japan in the past two summers.
With temperatures regularly above 40C and humidity rising up to 95 per cent, Japan’s summers have become a death trap with 57 people, including a construction worker at one of the Olympic venues, dying from the heat in less than a week a month ago.
A year earlier, at the same time of year that the Tokyo Olympics will be held, 65 people died in less than a week, triggering a national emergency and prompting Olympic officials to drastically rearrange the competition schedule to keep athletes away from danger.
Stream over 50 sports live & anytime on your TV or favourite device with KAYO SPORTS. The biggest Aussie sports and the best from overseas. Just $25/month. No lock-in contract. Get your 14 day free trial
The Rugby Sevens program has already been split into two sessions, one in the morning and another late in the afternoon, to avoid the worst of the conditions but Australia’s women’s team aren’t taking any chances.
“We’ve got quite a bit of heat strategies in place at the moment and one of them is just acclimatisation and spending time in heat chambers,” head coach John Manenti said.
“We’ve got some camps in warmer climates throughout the course of the season.”
Australia’s women, who will be defending the gold medal they won Rio de Janeiro in 2016, decided to implement as much heat training as possible in the lead-up to next year after visiting Japan last month to get a taste of what to expect.
“When we were there it was like 79 per cent — 80 per cent humidity and about 34C so the effect was probably not so much on day one but by day two and three it really started to knock the juice out of us,” Manenti said.
“So we’ve got to learn to live with that like all sports and all the teams there going over there and we’ve got some plans around it.
“Essentially, we’re pretty lucky because after Colorado, which is our first tournament, we pretty much follow the sun, so Dubai, Cape Town are going to be warm, Sydney, Hamilton are going to be warm.
“We hit Paris in summer, Canada’s pretty warm so we actually get to play most of the year in warm climates and obviously the Australian summer gets pretty hot too so we might just train a bit later in the day rather than training at night and in the morning, we might just put them out on the park at 1pm or 2pm in the hottest part of the day and get them used to it.”
Originally published as Australia’s Olympic Sevens team going to extreme lengths to prepare for Tokyo heatwave