Organizers at the World Athletics Championships pushed up the start time for the race walk and marathon events on Saturday in Tokyo as a countermeasure against the heat and humidity.
While the change may have offered a modicum of relief, the athletes in the men’s and women’s 35-kilometer race walks still had to fight through stifling humidity in a glimpse of what may lie ahead for the rest of the road races.
“We’ve been expecting it to be hot and humid and it was,” Australian Rhydian Cowley said. “It wasn’t quite as hot as it had been last week in our training camp in Chiba, so that was nice. But it was still really tough conditions, and you saw that by how it was affecting the athletes out there.”
