This year’s Rugby World Cup, the first to be held in Asia, will produce many unique challenges for the world’s top players, but one of the biggest might be Japan’s varied climate.
With the Sept. 20 to Nov. 2 tournament being held during Japan’s typhoon season and high humidity still a factor in the Japanese autumn, teams are preparing for stifling, sweaty conditions.
While this might mean a first World Cup where the Pacific island nations enjoy any advantage, some northern European teams have been taking measures to mitigate the effects.
England have been in Italy to prepare in similar conditions, while Ireland have been training wearing plastic vests to increase the amount that they sweat.
According to Tokyo-based dermatologist Tomoko Fujimoto, an expert on perspiration, the earlier that teams arrive in Japan to become accustomed to the climate, the better.
“Athletes — especially those coming from overseas to this high-temperature, high-humidity environment — need to train one to two months in advance to avoid experiencing heatstroke,” Fujimoto said.
Most teams are only arriving in Japan one or two weeks before their opening matches.
“Try to imagine the worst environment possible and try to train at a similar place,” Fujimoto added. “It is a burden for your body if you move to a location where there is a very different average temperature. It is possible that unless you are prepared enough, the [sweat] glands will not be working properly by the time of a match.”
During England’s training camp in Treviso in July, where humidity was as high as 80 to 90 percent, Mike Brown said that the conditions were tough, complaining that the humidity did not allow sweat to evaporate off the skin as it normally did.
“It’s hard to keep your core temperature low because you are sweating all the time,” said the outside back. “It just sits on your skin and then heats up even more.”
Fujimoto agreed that this might be a difficult issue in humid conditions, in which “waste sweat” accumulates and cannot evaporate.
“When humidity is too high ... sweat does not evaporate,” she said. “In Japan, we have conditions such as high temperature and humidity — and in case of typhoon season, humidity levels get raised... It is possible that temperature and humidity affect the controlling of body temperature for athletes. When it is still in water form, it is called ‘waste sweat.’”
The World Cup is set to be one of the most tightly contested in history, not least because, for the first time, northern and southern hemisphere sides cannot claim a home advantage regarding weather and field conditions.
This is likely to be amplified by differences in conditions at host cities, ranging from Sapporo in the north to Fukuoka, more than 2,000km to the south.
Fukuoka has been 7°C warmer and significantly more humid than Sapporo in September on average over the past five years, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
This will present challenges for teams such as England, who are to be based in Miyazaki, which boasts a subtropical climate, but play their first match against Tonga more than 2,000km to the north in Sapporo.
They then face the US in the central city of Kobe just four days later.
These dramatic changes in climate will be hard to deal with, Fujimoto believes.
“The human body cannot accommodate sudden changes of environment,” Fujimoto said. “So, in order for your sweat glands to work, you need to train them.”
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