Here, you can’t wait until dark to get some sleep
ST PETERSBURG: This is one of the world’s great cities, a magical mix of colours and canals that sparkle, especially in June, when the sun does not dip behind the Baltic Sea until around midnight. Visitors and residents wander the streets and embankments through the small hours of what is night during the rest of the year but just a brief dawn these days.
The nearly uninterrupted light this far north acts as a kind of human power plant, continuously fuelling millions of bodies but preventing them from getting the signals they need to begin the daily wind down that eventually leads to sleep.
These so-called White Nights make St. Petersburg during the World Cup a captivating but potentially problematic location for players, especially those whose teams are based here. The tension of the competition robs them of rest. Factor in the almost never-ending light and the result is an under-rested team whose players’ bodies have no idea what time it is when kickoff arrives.
TEMPTATION STRONG
“It’s strange, but it’s nice,” said Bryan Ruiz, the Costa Rica captain, whose team is spending the tournament at a hotel here. “We have to close the curtains around 10:30 or 11. Otherwise, we cannot sleep.” The temptation to leave the hotel is strong, he said.
The body operates on a 24-hour clock, and the ability to set and reset that clock depends on a light-dark cycle, explained Steven Lockley, a Harvard neuroscientist. Remove darkness from that cycle and human clocks, sleep and athletic performance can be thrown out of whack.
Lockley has consulted on sleep and light strategies for NASA, teams in the NFL and the NBA and with race car drivers who regularly travel to different environments and time zones.
He said any player who competed or slept in St. Petersburg would be well advised to start reducing exposure to light long before bedtime.
“The more light you are exposed to, the more alert you are, the longer it takes to go to sleep and the less deep sleep you experience,” Lockley said.
St. Petersburg and its environs are hosting seven matches and five teams during the tournament: Costa Rica, England, Croatia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Andy Walker, a spokesman for England’s Football Association, said officials took special care to address the sleep issue. “We had the hotel install the extra thick curtains, made of special material,” Walker said.
SPECIAL PREPARATION
The team also brought in special mattresses to maximise comfort. The training staff also has plenty of eye shades available should players need them.
Tomislav Pacak, a spokesman for Croatia’s team, said the federation had arranged ahead of time for extra dark and thick curtains at the Forest Rhapsody Resort, north of St. Petersburg. “It’s been working perfectly fine,” he assured in an email.
There have been defeats but the White Nights cannot be cited as the primary factor in a tournament where results shift on tiny margins unrelated to sleep, any slight advantage or disadvantage can make a difference. “It’s a shame that teams can take the negative impact of lack of sleep for granted,” Lockley said. “This is biology. It affects everyone.”