6 ways major sporting events can adapt to increasingly unsettled weather
As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, organising, competing in or even watching many sports is becoming increasingly challenging. Sporting bodies need to come up with new ways to cope with increasingly unpredictable weather – this is how they can do it.
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n 2019, cricket and rugby union both held World Cups – a once-in-four-years event. And, in both cases, the weather played an unwanted part. Persistent heavy rain in England in June forced the cancellation of four cricket matches. When Typhoon Hagibis brought destruction to Japan in October, it also made three games of rugby unplayable.
As climate change leads to more unusual or extreme weather, minimizing disruption to sporting events will become more of a headache for organisers. Here are six approaches for them to consider.
1. Carefully choosing dates and locations
Summer rain in England and October typhoons in Japan are hardly unheard of – but as weather patterns become more unpredictable, it will become trickier to use historical data as a guide to when and where conditions are most likely to be suitable.
In seeking to mitigate the risks, organisers may increasingly have to be creative with scheduling. The football governing body FIFA, having decided to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, opted to move the event from its usual June-July slot to November-December in the hope that extreme heat will be less of a problem.
Scheduling is especially a problem for winter sports, as warming temperatures and more erratic weather make snow conditions harder to predict. According to one recent study, of the 21 cities which have previously hosted the winter Olympics, only eight would likely be able to do so by 2050.
2. Building in more contingency plans
Fans of both cricket and rugby expressed surprise at the lack of contingency plans to allow weather-affected games to be played on another day or moved to another location. Organisers countered by citing logistical difficulties and reluctance to extend already-long tournaments: contingency plans existed for the knockout stages, but not the earlier group stages.
The rugby experience in particular may create pressure for organisers of tournaments in future to think again. While the games that had to be cancelled turned out not to affect which teams qualified for the knockout stage, the impending typhoon briefly put in doubt a pivotal match between Japan and Scotland – leading the Scotland team to threaten legal action.
3. Holding events at night
After a heatwave in Tokyo in summer 2019, organisers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics had to rework their timings to address concerns about the safety of athletes. The marathons will now start at 6am local time, in the hope that they will be completed before the heat of the day intensifies. Organisers have also proposed painting the route with a heat-reflective surface.
There are no guarantees: night-times can be hot too. At the World Athletics Championships in Doha in September 2019, the women’s marathon started at midnight – but still the temperature was 33 degrees with 73 percent humidity, and over a third of the athletes failed to finish.
Rain can also stop play. Photo by Al Quino
4. Air-conditioning stadiums
The athletics in Doha were held at Khalifa International Stadium, which – despite having no roof – is air-conditioned. It uses stadium-cooling technology specially developed by Qatar for the football World Cup in 2022. This involves cold air being piped in carefully calculated directions, to allow as much of it as possible to be captured and recycled.
The air conditioning systems are believed to have doubled or trebled the construction costs of the stadiums being purpose-built for the 2022 event.
5. Putting roofs on stadiums
Qatar is also building roofs on new football stadiums. The Al Wakrah Stadium, completed in 2019, has a pleated PTFE fabric roof that can be extended into a kind of sail to provide shade for players and spectators. The cable-membrane roof on the Lusail Iconic Stadium, scheduled for completion in 2020, will make it the world’s largest-capacity covered sports arena.
Putting a roof on a stadium not only helps with air conditioning – it is also an obvious strategy for coping with rain. Centre Court at Wimbledon cost GBP 100 million to cover, protecting tennis players from English summer downpours. This is unlikely to be a practicable solution for cricket, however: as grounds are large and typically surrounded by stands of uneven height, retrofitting roofs would be much more expensive.
6. Adapting the rules
Over the years, cricket has developed a complex formula to assign results when weather causes partially completed matches to be abandoned. Organisers of two of tennis’s major events, the US Open and Australian Open, introduced new rules in 2018 allowing players to take breaks when temperatures exceed a specified limit.
Scotland’s threat of legal action during the Rugby World Cup was prompted by tournament rules treating a cancelled match as a draw, which would have favoured Japan over Scotland given earlier results. Governing bodies may need to give deeper consideration to how rules can preserve fairness when extreme weather interrupts events.
The ideas presented in this article aim to inspire adaptation action – they are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Global Center on Adaptation.
