OPPRESSIVE HEAT UNRELENTING

Logistics of pandemic Games resolved, then everyone arrived in the blast furnace

After her team's win in its first beach volleyball match of Tokyo 2020, Sarah Pavan made her way toward a clutch of reporters. A Canadian press attaché handed her a mask to wear for the interview.

Pavan dutifully took it, but noted that she was parched and her face covered in sweat. She joked that she might pass out.

A couple of days earlier, a Russian archer did just that, keeling over in the blistering heat of Tokyo, where temperatures have been in the low-30s C every day with a soggy humidity that makes it feel more like the high-30s. Daniil Medvedev, the Russian tennis player, said after his first-round match that the heat was unbearable. He said tennis here should only be played in the evening, and there should be increased breaks between end changes — beyond the usual 90 seconds — to allow players to cool off a bit.

Here is the thing: It is hot. It is crazy hot. It is face-melting hot. With these Games still just rolling out of bed and stretching their legs, we are not yet at the point where the oppressive Tokyo heat has become a big story. But there's every chance that it will. This heat is nuts.

The funny thing about the weather is that 18 months ago, it was all that anyone who was planning to go to Tokyo for the Olympics was worried about. The usual three-day forecast for this part of Japan at this time of year is like so: blast furnace, convection oven, sauna with the heater left on too long. Chance of showers. The concerns were such that organizers moved the marathon and race-walk events way up to the northern island of Sapporo, where today it is, er, two degrees Celsius cooler than in Tokyo, and just as humid.

But then the pandemic arrived, and there were so many more things to occupy the Olympic-related concerns. Just staging these Games amid ongoing COVID-19 problems has been a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare, to say nothing of the associated health-and-safety risks of trying to keep tens of thousands of people in the same places but also far apart.

And so the heat was pushed to the back burner, a little bit. Ahem.

I arrived here on a Monday, then spent three days in hotel quarantine as per the rules, and other than noticing that it was rather soupy in the brief moments when I was outside going from the airport to the hotel, my early days in Tokyo were spent in a controlled climate. Not until I busted out of quarantine on the morning of the Opening Ceremony did I get a true taste of what it feels like here.

It feels like you are wrapped in a pizza pocket.

To stand outside for any length of time is to feel uncomfortably warm. Move around at all? Uncomfortably warm becomes hot and sweaty. At that Opening Ceremony, I was bathed in sweat merely from doing the following activities: 15-minute walk to bus, sit on bus, 15-minute walk to seat in stadium. And the bus was air-conditioned. It was still hot when the sun went down in the late evening. It was still hot when the sky was perfectly dark but for the glow of fireworks. I will grant you that I do not have the physical conditioning and shape of, say, Sarah Pavan, who is tall and lean. But I run a fair bit and am in good health. And the thing I keep coming back to is this: How in the world are these athletes able to exert themselves in this? It is wild.

Being a media member, I've spent most of the past few days around other media members, and we are collectively scurrying around to avoid the sun like bugs that just had their flower pot picked up from the patio stone. At the media bus hub, there are dozens of parking spots where vehicles pull up to collect people for delivery to venues, hotels and other Olympic facilities. Some of them have an umbrella for shade or, in exotic cases, a little gazebo. In VERY exotic case, a little gazebo and a fan. Journalists bunch together in the shady spots, looking for all the world like penguins huddling to keep warm, except it is the exact opposite of that.

We are advised to drink lots of fluids to keep hydrated, which makes sense, although the security at press venues requires us to take a sip from our water bottle to prove that it is in fact a drinkable liquid in there and not, I guess, a bomb. At the entrance to Ariake Tennis Park on Sunday, a Swedish journalist ahead of me who had brought four bottles of water and two Cokes had to crack open each one and sample it. He was definitely hydrated, at least.

I wish good health to anyone competing outdoors over the next two weeks. I would think twice before making a quick dash to catch a departing bus. I cannot imagine doing that on an exponential scale.