Keeping athletes cool in Beijing

Kinesiology environmental physiologist Jon Kolb, PhD, has spent the last four years examining the challenges that athletes will face in Beijing and coming up with a plan to help them succeed.

Nature magazine has called Beijing the world’s “most polluted city.” In August, the temperature routinely goes above 40C and humidity hovers around 100 percent. Taking an afternoon stroll sounds like a challenge—much less setting a world record in an Olympic event.

Kinesiology researcher Jon Kolb has the unenviable task of taking these formidable challenges and as he says, “turn them into opportunities.”

“Will it be challenging?” asks Kolb. “Absolutely, however, it will be challenging for everybody, so if our team is extremely well prepared for the conditions they’ll be competing under, it could actually become a competitive advantage.”

Kolb is an environmental physiologist—he studies the environmental factors such as heat, wind, humidity or pollution that challenge the body. He then suggests ways that athletes can prepare and train to avoid a drop in performance.

Kolb has been studying the ‘challenging’ conditions in Beijing since 2006. Armed with a portable lab (and a lot of Gatorade), Kolb’s first task was to determine the challenges that factors like pollution might have on our athletes’ performance. “One of the first things I examined was the pollution in Beijing,” says Kolb. “The Nature article based its findings on the amount of particulate matter in the air—fine molecules of things like dust or soot etc. The question was: how would that actually impact performance?”

To find the answer, Kolb set up a portable lab in Beijing; testing respiration and pulmonary function under the smoggy skies and came up with a surprising conclusion. “For the most part I didn’t find any significant changes in performance due to the pollution,” says Kolb. “That’s not to say that there won’t be challenges. The pollution will create watery eyes, or a scratchy throat for some people, things which will be unpleasant and could have a psychological effect, unless—and this is crucial—unless they’re prepared for the conditions.”

To that end, Kolb has recommended that athletes visit Beijing at least a few times before the actual games and that they get used to training in the heat. He put together a book outlining a best practices approach for coaches so that athletes can create a strategy to deal with jet-lag or conditions like asthma.

“There are two areas where I think athletes will face challenges. First of all if they have a pre-existing condition like asthma, or even if they had childhood asthma, the Beijing conditions could be a problem. The key is knowing what you’re going to face and as coaches and individual athletes, coming up with a strategy to deal with it. All of us are physiologically unique in how our bodies react to the environment. You have to know how your body will react and come up with a strategy that you know works for you. That’s what I mean by being prepared.”

The second area that Kolb believes will be challenging for athletes is in the longer distance events such as the marathon, when they obviously will be competing in the smog for longer periods of time.

Canadian Olympic officials are doing everything they can to help the athletes succeed. They have created a training centre which will allow athletes to relax away from the intensity of the athletes’ village. “We’ve basically converted the second floor of an apartment building,” says Kolb. “We’ve outfitted it with workout equipment and cooling hydrobaths which will allow people to recover before and after events.”

Cooling is the other obvious concern for the Olympians and besides “pre-cooling” using things like ice-vests and cooling gloves, Kolb says that for multi-event athletes, cooling between events is going to be extremely important. “Once again, athletes should be aware of this and training for this so that they’re bodies are used to it and that psychologically they’re ready for it.”