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As soaring temperatures continue to be a feature of this year’s Rugby World Cup in Japan, Kiwi athletes are going to extreme lengths to make sure they’ll be ready for what next year’s Tokyo Olympics have to offer.
The Rugby World Cup has already seen matches be stopped for enforced water breaks, and with Tokyo 2020 expected to be even hotter, Kiwi athletes are thinking outside the box.
Sailing siblings Sam and Molly Meech are just two of those, taking to a High Performance Sport New Zealand heat chamber in an effort to simulate the sweltering conditions likely to be on show in Tokyo.
“It’s hot, but it’s also a really uncomfortable feeling,” Meech told 1 NEWS.
“That’s a good representation of what Tokyo, Japan is actually like.”
While the Tokyo heat is an inevitability of next year’s games, the humidity will be another challenge for our athletes to face, this year’s World Cup reaching 90 per cent.
The temperatures maybe don’t seem that hot, like 30 mid 30s but it’s the high humidity that makes it really stressful on the body,” HPSNZ lead heat strategist Julia Casadio tells 1 NEWS.
“It feels like 40 to 50 degrees in the summer there.”
Athletes aren’t the only ones in the firing line either, organisers even testing snow machines in an attempt to cool down spectators – more gadgets to be released next year.
Kiwi athletes though, are confident that their preparation will pay off come Tokyo 2020.
“Come race day, we’ll be in our best shape,” Sam Meech says.
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