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.”

In the wake of the Eaton Fire, Altadena and Pasadena’s music community have really shown up to support fire survivors, especially fellow musicians who lost instruments and record collections.

That effort continues this weekend with a special donation concert at a Pasadena record store, with the aim of getting vinyl records back in the hands of survivors who lost their collections.

“You know, our name is Healing Force of the Universe, and I think that gives me a pretty clear direction… especially after the fires,” said Austin Manuel, founder of Pasadena record store, where Sunday’s show will be held.

The record donation effort is the brainchild of musician Brandon Jay, who founded the nonprofit Altadena Musicians after losing his home and almost all of his family’s instruments in the Eaton Fire. Through Altadena Musicians’s donation and registry platform, Jay said he and his partners have helped some 1,200 fire survivors get their music instruments back.

Brandon Jay.

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Robert Garrova

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Now, that effort has fanned out to restoring vinyl record collections.

“All of that stuff evaporated for thousands of people,” Jay said. “Look at your own record collection and be like, ‘Wow, what if that whole thing disappeared?’”

You might know Jay from several bands over the years, including Lutefisk, a 1990s alt-rock band based in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Gwendolyn Sanford, composed music for TV shows, including Orange is the New Black and Weeds.

Jay plans to play some holiday tunes at Sunday's record donation show (which LAist is the media sponsor), along with fellow musician Daniel Brummel of Sanglorians. Brummel, who was also a founding member of Pasadena’s indie-rock sensation Ozma, said he was grateful to Jay for his fire recovery work and to Manuel for making Healing Force available for shows like this.

Brummel, who came close to losing his own home in the Eaton Fire, recalled a show he played at Healing Force back in March.

Ryen Slegr (left) and Daniel Brummel perform with their band, Ozma, on the 2014 Weezer Cruise.

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“The trauma of the fires was still really fresh,” Brummel said. After playing a cover of Rufus Wainwright’s “Going to a Town,” that night — which includes the lyrics “I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down” — Brummel said his neighbors in the audience told him the rendition hit them hard. “It felt really powerful. And without that space, it just wouldn’t have occurred.”

Details

Healing Force of the Universe Record Donation Show
Featuring: Quasar (aka Brandon Jay), Sanglorians (Daniel Brummel) and The Acrylic.
Sunday, Dec. 14; 2 to 5 p.m.
1200 E. Walnut St., Pasadena
Tickets are $15 or you can donate 5 or more records at the door. More info here.

Topline:

The case: In September, the city settled a lawsuit brought forward by two brothers in their 70s who said they suffered serious injuries after an LAPD officer crashed into their car. Days before the $18 million settlement was reached, lawyers for the brothers said Feldstein Soto called an expert witness testifying for the plaintiffs and “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

The response: Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request. Her spokesperson said the settlement “had nothing to do” with the expert witness. Her campaign manager told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call and did not know the person had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

What Jurado says: In a statement to LAist, Jurado said she wants to “make sure that the city’s legal leadership is guided by integrity and accountability, especially when their choices affect public trust, civic rights and the city’s limited resources."

What’s next: The motion needs to go through a few committees before reaching the full City Council. If it passes, the motion calls for the city attorney to “report to council in closed session within 45 days regarding the ethics breach violation and give updates to the City Council."

Every year in Santa Ana, Luis Cantabrana turns the front of his home into an elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe that draws hundreds of visitors.

Along the front of the house, the multi-colored altar is filled with lights, flowers and a stained-glass tapestry behind a sculpture of the Lady of Guadalupe. Cantabrana’s roof also is lit up with the green, white and red lights that spell out “Virgen de Guadalupe” and a cross.

Visitors are welcomed with music and the smell of roses as they celebrate the saint, but this year’s gathering comes after a dark year for immigrant communities.

Luis Cantabrana stands in front of the stunning altar he built in front of his home in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Every year, his display draws hundreds of visitors.

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Destiny Torres

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Why do they celebrate? 

In 1513, the Virgin Mary appeared before St. Juan Diego between Dec. 9 and Dec. 12, asking him to build a church in her honor. Her image — a brown-skinned woman wearing a green veil with her hands together in prayer and an angel at her feet — miraculously appeared on his cloak.

To celebrate in Santa Ana, worshippers gathered late-night Wednesday and in the very early hours Dec. 12 to pray the rosary, sing hymns and celebrate the saint.

Cantabrana has hosted worshippers at his home for 27 years — 17 in Santa Ana.

The altar started out small, he said, and over the years, he added a fabric background, more lights and flowers (lots and lots of flowers).

“It started with me making a promise to la Virgen de Guadalupe that while I had life and a home to build an altar, that I would do it,” Cantabrana said. “Everything you see in photos and videos is pretty, but when you come and see it live, it's more than pretty. It's beautiful.”

The Santa Ana home's elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe draws hundreds of visitors each year.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Gathering in a time of turmoil 

Many also look to the Lady of Guadalupe for protection, especially at a time when federal enforcement has rattled immigrant communities.

“People don’t want to go to work, they don’t want to take their kids to school, but the love we have for our Virgen de Guadalupe,” Cantabrana said. “We see that la Virgen de Guadalupe has a lot of power, and so we know immigration [enforcement] won’t come here.”

Margarita Lopez of Garden Grove has been visiting the altar for three years with her husband. She’s been celebrating the Virgencita since she was a young girl. Honoring the saint is as important now as ever, she said.

“We ask, and she performs miracles,” Lopez said.

Claudia Tapia, a lifelong Santa Ana resident, said the Virgin Mary represents strength.

“Right now, with everything going on, a lot of our families [have] turned and prayed to the Virgen for strength during these times,” Tapia said. “She's a very strong symbol of Mexican culture, of unity, of faith and of resilience.”

See it for yourself

The shrine will stay up into the new year on the corner of Broadway and Camile Street.