Olympic Records Are Getting Harder to Break for a Scary Reason
This article was republished from Sequencer and lightly edited for Slate. These rising temperatures may be one of the few records broken this summer, since they’re whittling athletes’ chances of making history on the Olympic stage. For example, the last world record for the men’s half marathon, a race time of 57 minutes and 32 seconds, was broken in 2021 by just a second. Related From Slate How Olympic Gymnastics Has Utterly Changed Since Tokyo If athletes have slower reaction time and make more tactical errors, it won’t just impact their record-setting abilities. Heat affects everybody, so if there’s one small consolation, it’s that athletes gunning for gold just have to make sure they fare better than their rivals in a universally hostile environment.

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