The Brief

Curled up on a small, white rectangle of fabric on the grass by a park bench in Paris, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon inadvertently took the internet by storm simply by sleeping outside. The moment, posted to social media on August 5 by a fellow Olympic athlete, came a week after Ceccon failed to qualify for the men’s 200-meter backstroke finals, despite having just won gold in the 100-meter event.

In an interview with an Italian broadcaster, Ceccon blamed his performance gap on subpar sleeping conditions in the Olympic Village — namely, heat. Last week, media speculation that the uncomfortable temperatures were also behind his alfresco nap stirred an already roiling pot of concerns around the impact of extreme weather on this year’s summer games. (The Italian Swimming Federation denied that Ceccon’s nap was related to conditions in the Olympic village.)

In the weeks leading up to the Paris Olympics, weather forecasters and athletes alike feared that the games could become the hottest on record, surpassing the 2021 Tokyo events, where high humidity and 90-degree-Fahrenheit days led 100 athletes to seek medical attention for heat illnesses; even more nonathletes followed suit. A punishing heat dome settled over Paris on July 29, lasting for four days and spiking temperatures to highs of 97 degrees F as the first week of the games were underway.

During the scorching weather, national teams rushed to keep their athletes in tip-top shape, renting air conditioners for their bedrooms in the Olympic Village and offering them ice vests. The Australian Olympic Committee even invested in state-of-the-art monitors to record on-the-ground temperature, radiation, humidity, and wind speed, resulting in personalized recommendations to help their athletes manage heat risks. For some outdoor sports, like tennis and soccer, new protocols for additional rest breaks were triggered as temperatures surpassed predetermined safety thresholds.

Climate change is driving up the frequency of extreme and deadly heat waves. Rings of Fire II, a report on Olympic heat released before this year’s games began on July 26, found that average summer temperatures in Paris have warmed by 3.1 degrees Celsius, or about 5.6 degrees F, since 1924, the last time the City of Light hosted the games.

“Yesterday, climate change crashed the Olympics,” said climatologist Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution, an academic project that studies climate change impacts on meteorology, on July 31. “If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuel, Paris would have been about 3 degrees C cooler and much safer for sport.”

Just a few degrees can make a big difference for athletes. In warm temperatures, the body is less able to shed the heat it generates, which can impact performance and health: A 2023 study of marathon and racewalking athletes found that a 2.7 degrees F increase in core body temperature could result in up to 20 percent slower performance times. And as the body tries to cool down, it sweats and dilates blood vessels. When these mechanisms are pushed too hard, they lead to dangerous health risks — such as dehydration, organ failure, and heart attacks. And the longer a heat wave drags on, the more deadly the impacts become.

Extreme heat affects a wide range of sports. The Rings of Fire report, a collaboration between the British Association for Sustainable Sport and the Australian climate advocacy group Frontrunners, documented stories from elite athletes across 15 sports on how extreme temperatures had impacted their careers and health. In the report, British swimmer Hector Pardoe said he was “practically paralytic” after a heat stroke that left him vomiting and motionless during a competition in Budapest. For Yusuke Suzuki, a Japanese racewalker, heatstroke was a torturous ordeal that took two years to recover from.

“Going forward, I don’t see this being any less of a problem,” said Mike Tipton, a human physiology researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who contributed to the report. While Tipton is encouraged by the changes he sees taking place across sports to protect athletes and fans from extreme heat — such as water breaks and cooling stations — he also cautions against losing sight of the importance of mitigating the direct cause of climate change: humans burning fossil fuels.

The organizers of the Paris Olympics would seem to agree. In the years leading up to the games, the committee made unprecedented sustainability promises like slashing the greenhouse gas emissions of recent Olympics in half. But, along with a 60 percent plant-based menu, the decision to cut energy use by building Olympic Village dorms with geothermal cooling, rather than air conditioning, has become a main source of athletes’ complaints about the accommodations. Bernadette Szocs, a Romanian table tennis player, told The Guardian that the fans offered in dorm rooms weren’t enough. “You can feel it is too hot in the room,” she said.

Japan's Kaito Kawabata lies down after competing in the men's 4x400--meter relay at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

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Antonin Thuillier

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“I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station in 2023 about the decision to eschew air-conditioning. But as temperature projections and concerns climbed, eventually, the organizers caved and ordered 2,500 air-conditioning units for teams willing to pay for them. Some, like the Korean swim team, have opted to stay in hotels. Unequal access to such comforts have raised concerns of two-tier games.

Experts agree that air-conditioning can create a competitive advantage. “Being able to cool down at night is a significant part of managing heat risk,” said Richard Franklin, a professor of public health and tropical medicine at James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia. Franklin added that heat waves often come with higher nighttime temperatures that prevent the body from fully recovering, and that lack of sleep and the physical strain of competition can increase risks.

There are other ways that athletes can mitigate the dangers of competing in high temperatures.

“The best thing you can do is prepare ahead of the games by acclimatizing your body to the conditions,” said Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on how global warming is changing sports. She says that each sport comes with unique risk factors, such as time spent on exposed pavement, or duration of play. But for any athlete to properly sync their body before competition, she says, exercising in the heat is crucial. “It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it pushes the boundaries of when they feel the impacts. It makes a big, big difference.”

Hannah Mason, a public health lecturer at James Cook University and lead author of a 2024 paper analyzing the impacts of extreme heat on mass sporting events, said that other factors — including the availability of shade and existing health conditions — should be considered in athletes’ heat preparedness plans. For example, Paralympic athletes often use equipment, like wheelchairs, that can trap more heat.

Britain's Jack Draper cools himself with a bag of ice during a break in play.

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Martin Bernetti

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Tipton, Orr, and Mason all agreed that, eventually, the escalating dangers of climate change will leave Olympics organizers with no option but to change the timing of summer games to happen during months with cooler weather. The good news, Tipton says, is that teams and athletic federations have started taking the risk of heat more seriously. “We’re seeing the nature of sports change in terms of the rules, regulations, and permissible cooling strategies,” he said.

According to Mason, more top-down rulemaking on safety limits will be crucial for managing risk. With the high stakes and pressure of competition, she says athletes are often unwilling to back out even when conditions become dangerously hot.

“If it’s a few degrees too hot, they’re not going to back out,” she said. “We need policies to fall back on so that we don’t put these decisions in the hands of athletes that have spent their whole life training for that event.”

It’s taken over a decade and $1.3 billion, but Hollywood Burbank’s new terminal is finally ready for action. On Tuesday, Oct. 13, the first passengers will be taking off and arriving at the brand-new structure.

Visitors note: The new terminal entrance has moved from Thornton Avenue to the intersection of Winona Avenue and Hollywood Way. There’s also a central security checkpoint and an indoor baggage claim.

The project stemmed from Burbank’s Measure B, passed in 2016.

LAist reporter Cato Hernandez got a sneak peek inside the building last week and reported on the scope and the thinking behind the decor.

William Contreras hit a tying homer in the fifth and singled home the go-ahead run an inning later as the Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers 7-4 on Monday in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series.

Four relievers combined to retire the last 15 Dodgers batters in order as the Brewers took a 2-0 lead over the two-time defending World Series champions in this best-of-seven series, which heads to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Wednesday.

The Brewers are chasing their second pennant and first in the NL. They made their lone World Series appearance in 1982, when they were in the American League.

Los Angeles is trying to become the first NL team to win three straight World Series. The Dodgers last rallied from a 2-0 deficit to win a series in 2020, when they beat the Atlanta Braves in a seven-game NLCS before going on to win the World Series.

The Dodgers will need more punch from their lineup to have a chance at getting back to the Fall Classic. They mustered just three hits Monday and went 0 for 4 with runners in scoring position to drop to 2 for 26 in those situations this postseason.

Los Angeles couldn’t even get a boost from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who entered 8-1 with a 2.14 ERA in 11 career playoff appearances. Yamamoto lasted just 2 2/3 innings for his shortest postseason start.

The Dodgers took the lead on three occasions in the first five innings. Milwaukee responded each time, the last coming when Contreras tied the game with a 436-foot homer to center off Kris Bubic in the fifth.

That turned the game into a battle of the bullpens, where the Brewers again had the edge.

Dustin May, JoJo Romero, Abner Uribe and Aaron Ashby combined to shut down the Dodgers after Logan Henderson’s early exit.

The score was tied 4-all when Milwaukee’s David Hamilton was hit by a pitch from Brock Stewart to lead off the sixth. Stewart attempted a pickoff throw that went off the glove of first baseman Freddie Freeman and into foul territory for an error, advancing Hamilton to second.

After Jackson Chourio grounded out, the right-handed Stewart walked the left-handed-hitting Brice Turang to face the right-handed Contreras, who had homered in his previous plate appearance.

Contreras singled to left this time to bring home Hamilton with the go-ahead run.

Turang and Jake Bauers added RBI singles in the eighth to extend Milwaukee’s lead.

Neither starter lasts long

The anticipated pitchers’ duel between Yamamoto and Henderson didn’t work out according to plan.

In three previous playoff starts following Dodgers losses, Yamamoto had gone 3-0 with a 1.23 ERA. When he faced the Brewers in last year’s NLCS, he threw the first playoff complete game since Justin Verlander did it in 2017.

This time, Yamamoto couldn’t even make it out of the third inning before leaving with the Dodgers behind 3-2.

Henderson entered Monday having not allowed more than three runs in any of his 24 career starts (including the postseason). That streak ended when he allowed four runs over four innings.

Because Henderson committed two errors — matching his previous career total — only two of the runs were earned.

Milwaukee trailed 2-1 in the third when Bauers capped a 12-pitch plate appearance by taking a 3-2 offering in the dirt to load the bases with a walk. Christian Yelich followed by lining a single up the middle that brought home two runs and knocked Yamamoto out of the game.

Los Angeles bailed out Yamamoto by scoring twice in the fifth.

After Kyle Tucker hit a leadoff double, Tommy Edman sacrificed him to third. Henderson fielded the bunt and made a wild throw to first, enabling Tucker to score and moving Edman to second.

Edman advanced to third when Mookie Betts grounded out, and scored on Freeman’s sacrifice fly.

Henderson also had made a wild throw to first on a pickoff attempt in the third inning that allowed Edman to score from third.

Up next

Robert Gasser (5-5, 3.87 ERA) is expected to start for Milwaukee in Game 3. Gasser allowed one run over five innings when the Brewers won 3-1 at San Diego to clinch their NL Division Series.

The Dodgers hadn’t announced their Game 3 starting pitcher.

Actor and disability rights advocate RJ Mitte, who brought a lifetime of experience with cerebral palsy to fictional family struggles in an essential role on “Breaking Bad,” died Monday at age 34, authorities and his representatives said.

Cameron County Justice of the Peace Cyndi Hinojosa told The Associated Press she declared Mitte dead at about 1:30 p.m. at what she believed was his home in Brownsville, Texas. She said she was unable to provide a cause, but an autopsy will be performed.

Mitte played Walter White Jr., the son of Bryan Cranston’s chemistry teacher-turned-meth dealer Walter White on nearly every episode of the five seasons of the AMC show, which recently ranked as the best of the 21st century in a New York Times poll.

Diagnosed at age 3, Mitte told the AP in 2014 that his disability and the surrounding struggles with physical therapy, family problems and exorbitant medical bills — all key subjects on the show — made him better at his job.“You develop a different mentality and you develop a different look at how the world sees you and how you see the world,” he said. “You’re able to use that. And I think it’s an asset instead of something that would hinder.”

Mitte was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi.

He landed small guest roles on sitcoms after moving to Los Angeles to act in 2006. Like his character, he was in his mid-teens when he began his work on “Breaking Bad,” starting in 2007. The show ran from 2008 to 2013.

“Mitte brought authenticity to the role and built a platform on disability awareness and inclusion,” the actor’s representatives said in a statement announcing his death. The statement said he used “his platform to challenge stereotypes and promote greater representation.”

His later credits included the ABC Family series “Switched at Birth” and the superhero satire series “Guardians of Justice.”

He was also a producer of several independent films.

As an advocate, he served as an ambassador for United Cerebral Palsy and Shriners Children’s. He was also president of his own Mitte Foundation supporting philanthropic and community initiatives around disabilities.