No walking about at World Cup – Dr Warren Blake

FOOTBALLERS AND fans will have to take care not to overexpose themselves to the heat in Qatar at the FIFA World Cup. That’s the word of advice from Warren Blake, who was president of the JAAA when Jamaica contested the 2019 World Championships in the Qatari capital of Doha.

As it was at the World Championships, the competition and practice venues will be cooled by a ground-level air conditioning system that delivers moisturising droplets of water to keep temperatures down. Away from those venues, due caution will have to be followed.

“The fans that come to football, they will want to move about and when you move about, even for short distances, you sweat a lot because it’s just so hot because when we walked five minutes, 10 minutes to the shopping centre from where the hotel was, by the time you reached the shopping centre, your shirt is wet and your pants feel wet because you’re sweating so much,” said Dr Blake.

WALKING DIFFICULT

Asked for advice for Jamaicans journeying to the World Cup, he replied, “walking about is going to be difficult because, trust me, the time I went to the mall, I walked there once, and I never walked to the mall again after that. I made sure I got a taxi or got transportation from the hotel. I didn’t try it again. I lost so much fluid in that 10-minute walk to the mall that I realised that it’s not something to really do and I noticed as well that none of the locals walk. They don’t walk around town. They take a transport, and they live there.”

With this in mind, the 2019 Jamaica athletics team got to Doha early for an event that ran from September 27 to October 6.

“That was part of the reason why we went in a bit early so that the kids would get acclimatised to the heat,” Blake recalled.

Blake continued, “the footballers, once they stay within the hotel environment and they move from hotel to venue, they won’t be so impacted and they may well get there a little early to acclimatise to the heat because with acclimatisation, you don’t lose as much salt when you sweat, you know, as you do when you get freshly exposed to a hot environment.”

He explained that the body adjusts. “So, the body regulates the amount of salt you lose through sweat after a while and it acclimatises to a sort of new normal,” he explained.

The predicted high temperature for Qatar in November is 28 degrees Celsius, which compares to 10 degrees in England on the last day of League football, November 13.

Understandably, big teams headed to Qatar as soon as they could.

“They would go in early. They would advise their people to take lots of fluids, water and electrolyte fluids, things like Powerade, Gatorade, that sort of thing that replaces electrolytes,”, Blake prescribed.